Reviving Revolutionary Momentum } 191
Third Front was a large-scale and systematic effort to prepare the country to
wage a major war with one or both of the two superpowers.
Third Front construction during the first phase (1965–1969) facilitated
China’s assistance to Hanoi. Munitions from those Third Front factories
could move more swiftly to North Vietnam over newly built rail lines. But
scholar Barry Naughton suggests that Mao’s fear was not of an American in-
vasion of China from Indochina, but an American attack on east China’s cit-
ies. Naughton points out that Mao’s Third Front plan corresponded roughly
to the largely successful Nationalist effort in 1937–1939 during the first years
of the Sino-Japanese war to evacuate defense industrial equipment from east
coast cities to China’s southwest interior. It also corresponded to the Soviet
effort to build a defense industrial base east of the Ural Mountains during the
1928–1941 period, an effort that contributed to the Soviet defeat of German
armies during World War II. Mao was preparing China for war even as he was
re-revolutionizing China via the Cultural Revolution. Yet again, international
crisis paralleled domestic mobilization. By 1969, that threat was quite real.
A second stage of the Third Front began in 1969 with the confrontation
with the Soviet Union. The focus of work during this period was southwestern
Henan and northwestern Hubei. A new iron and steel complex was begun at
Wuyang in Henan. A new heavy truck factory was set up at Shiyuan in Hubei.
Workers and managers from the auto vehicle factory in Changchun in Jilin
province were shifted to the new Hubei plant. New factories were set up to
produce components: rubber, tires, bearings, paint. New dams were built or
planned (including the huge dam at Gezhouba on the Yangtze) to supply elec-
tricity for the plants. Again, many of the workshops and factories were sepa-
rated by wide distances and situated in canyons or caves. New rail lines and
roads had to be built to tie facilities together. The dominant concern during
this period was a possible Soviet attack.
Third Front work lost its top priority and rapidly slowed down in late 1971
with the fall of Lin Biao and the onset of PRC-US rapprochement. Regarding
the latter, the improved security environment created by rapprochement with
the United States and the rapid expansion of China’s diplomatic relations
meant that top priority on preparation for war no longer made sense. Third
Front efforts had been immensely expensive. Naughton estimates that nearly
53 percent of all national investment and as much as two-thirds of the cen-
tral government’s investment in industry during the 1966 to 1970 period went
into Third Front projects. For ordinary Chinese this meant extremely Spartan
lives: cramped living spaces, poor diets, and very few consumer goods. It also
meant that China’s scarce capital was invested in ways that provided very low
economic returns on investment. The pattern of Third Front investment was,
in fact, hugely inefficient.
This crash campaign to prepare China for war was made necessary by
Mao’s confrontational diplomacy toward Moscow and support for revolution