1 - The Coming of the Third Front Campaign

Summary

Chapter 1 places the Third Front in the climate of post-Great Leap Forward policy making. When the Great Leap failed, a group of leaders centered on Liu Shaoqi reaffirmed top-down control and promoted higher consumption, lower growth targets, and coastal development. Mao Zedong viewed these policies as being dangerously close to Soviet “revisionism” and wanted to push China onto a different economic path. I argue that Mao utilized growing American and Soviet animosity to tar post-Great Leap policies as a threat to national security and launch a new Maoist approach to building socialism in China in the Third Front campaign. Mao and his colleagues set up the Third Front to be different from the Great Leap Forward, which had relied on bottom–up mass mobilization and simple technologies. In contrast, the Third Front fused low– and high–tech methods in a centrally planned project to covertly industrialize inland areas in anticipation of a future conflict with Cold War rivals.