Reviving Revolutionary Momentum } 189
industrial capacity on the east coast, and 2) spreading anti-US wars of national
liberation across Southeast Asia. The second aspect will be dealt with in the
next chapter.
Regarding construction of a defense industrial base in China’s interior,
from August 1964 through late 1971 China undertook a huge, extremely expen-
sive, and centrally directed effort to create a comprehensive, integrated, and
self-reliant defense industrial base in China’s mountainous interior. The Third
Front, as this effort was called, was designed to ensure that the PLA would
have industrial sources of modern weapons after China’s existing industrial
areas on the east coast were either occupied or destroyed by superpower air
bombardment. The new military industrial base was designed to provide the
PLA with tools of modern warfare—tanks, artillery, missiles, heavy trucks,
airplanes, ships, atomic weapons—that could sustain a protracted war against
either the United States or the Soviet Union. Or both. Mao’s classic doctrine
of people’s war relied mainly on lightly armed small-unit guerrilla war. But
that was a function of necessity, not of preference. Revolutionary armed forces
should undertake, Mao believed, “mobile warfare” as soon as possible, as soon
as they could procure the sophisticated arms that would allow them to wage
positional battles with enemy forces. Not only heavy weapons but even rifles,
machine guns, and mortars would be in short supply after China’s east coast
industrial areas were destroyed or occupied.^53
By mid-1964, a draft of the Third Five Year Plan (1965–1970) had been cir-
culating among the elite for two years. That draft provided for continued
recovery from the Great Leap Forward via investment in agriculture and con-
sumer goods. New investment was to go mostly to existing industrial areas in
eastern China. Then, in May, Mao abruptly rejected that draft and called for a
shift of investment to China’s interior, and import not of food but of advanced
industrial machinery and equipment. In August, just after the Gulf of Tonkin
incident and the first US air attacks on North Vietnam, Mao proposed a mas-
sive effort to create in China’s interior a “Third Front”: an integrated and com-
prehensive defense industrial base to prepare China to resist attack from one
or both superpowers. Mao’s proposal was adopted without dissent or oppo-
sition. The Third Front area embraced all or part of ten provinces west of a
huge mountainous escarpment running northeast to southwest across China
and delineating eastern, coastal China from the interior. The land west of
this escarpment is generally mountainous and above 500 meters elevation, al-
though there are several basins, most prominently Sichuan. The many moun-
tain valleys of this region are ideal for military defense against both land and
air attack. Many of the factories built in the region during the Third Front ef-
fort were located in canyons, making air attack difficult and limiting damage.
Figure 7-3 illustrates the Third Front.
During the first phase of the Third Front effort, an entire industrial struc-
ture centering on mining, metallurgy, electricity, and heavy equipment