Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xii, 281 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos.) US$39.99, cloth. ISBN 978-1-108-48955-3.
The Third Front Movement (三线建设) was an industrial defense campaign and self-reliant developmental strategy led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1964 to the mid-1970s. To wage protracted guerilla warfare and People’s War against foreign imperialists and revisionists, the CCP fortified Small Third Fronts in 28 cities along the coast and a Big Third Front in landlocked south/northwest provinces. The heavily militarized construction mobilized 15 million people, extracted 20 billion RMB in funding, and organized 1,945 small/medium-sized enterprises and research institutes across China’s vast hinterlands.
Because of its covert and strategic nature, however, by 2019 there had only been less than 10 monographs and 140 articles published on the topic, and five academic conferences convened. Moreover, the limited number of sources available (personal memoirs, diaries, and oral histories) have been edited, if not censored, for political correctness. Representing a fragmented collocation of parts, they fail to provide a systematic account of the Third Front in terms of the multiple global and domestic factors at play, which would allow scholars to better comprehend the institutional dynamics of China’s early march toward socialist modernity.
Against this background, Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China by Covell Meyskens fills this gap by reconstructing the Third Front’s history through a decade of tenacious fieldwork across the mainland, including municipal and provincial archival offices, and hundreds of oral interviews. Employing rich empirical and communicative research methods, the book elucidates the foundations, processes, and evolution of the Third Front, and provides context and background knowledge to some of the most scrutinized issues in today’s Chinese political science studies: civil-military integration, the military strategy and strategic deterrence of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), rural-urban inequality, human rights, and domestic governance.
The first and second chapters begin by explaining how China’s increasingly hostile external environment—shaped by the split with the Soviets over ideological differences from 1960, border conflict with India in 1962, the proliferation of US military bases across the Asia-Pacific, and raiding Guomindang forces—sowed chaos in the CCP’s decision-making system. Adopting a second-image reversed perspective, the author shows how these threat perceptions crystallized China’s resolution to direct national resources away from the coast, which was prone to nuclear and conventional invasions through land, air, and sea. Although the Great Leap Forward had previously produced disastrous results, ceasing construction on all related projects by 1962, Mao was adamant in initiating a new industrialization drive to create a safe rear defense area, threatening opposition as leaning toward “Khrushchev-style revisionism” (59). The book goes on to show the dynamics of relocating factories, schools, and organizations to mountainous, dispersed, camouflaged sites in inner regions, and the central role of unified administrative control derived from the Daqing experience.
Chapters 3 throught 5 analyze the effect of Maoist thought and behavioural standards on the daily affairs of hundreds of thousands of relocated young men. Both cadres and workers were under instructions to “work hard” under the slogan of “produce first and consume later,” to unify their thinking in line with the Quotations of Chairman Mao, and even participate in “all-out-war oath-swearing” ceremonies (155–156). On the one hand, these social psychological engineering efforts instilled in them a “deep animosity towards American imperialism” and helped them submit to the cause of the Third Front (175–176). However, the reality was less fortunate, as people had to sleep in mud huts, live in constant fear of wild animals, suffer diarrhea and hepatitis from dirty drinking water, and asthma and pneumoconiosis from aerial pollution. Meat and fish were delicacies rarely enjoyed more than once a month. According to Meyskens, however, these were “privileged hardship[s]” as the people had “guaranteed food, housing, schools, and medical services,” unlike those in the countryside (189).
The epilogue describes how the Sino-US rapprochement contributed to the demilitarization of China’s national development strategy. While the author argues that over half of the Third Front projects failed because of widespread factional fights, uneconomic security requirements of the Party, and an insistence on accelerating the pace of construction and consequential “costly refurbishing” (201–208), he agrees that the Third Front “sped up the circulation of regional resources” and “advanced the integration of the interior into countryside networks” (202), which “endowed inland China with the building blocks of industrial modernity” (234). Although such a conclusion may require additional inquiries, it is true that by 1975 the infrastructural, technical, and production capacity of national defense industries (nuclear, electronic, aerospace, and shipbuilding) established in the third-tier regions surpassed the first- and second-tier regions. Even today, most of China’s state-of-the art weapons industries and vital strategic infrastructures are still located in third-tier areas.
Likewise, Mao’s self-reliant developmental strategy is also relevant in the contemporary Go West Campaign, internal circulation strategy, and the Belt and Road Initiative. Further research on this issue can focus on how the Third Front engendered notable social changes in areas such as education, public health, transportation, migration, marriage, and land reform. Unlike the movement of educated youth to go and work in rural or mountainous areas, which is still a politically sensitive topic to explore, the Third Front still has potential for further research, and this book has laid the groundwork for future efforts.
Youngjune Chung
Tongji University, Shanghai