To prepare for possible American or Soviet attacks, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) built heavy industries in mountainous, inland areas in western and central China from the mid-1960s to the 1970s. These remote regions were called the “Third Front,” as opposed to the First Front (the coastal regions) and the Second Front (the regions behind the coast). The Third Front was China's largest development project under Mao Zedong's leadership (1949–76). Its capital construction expenditure surpassed the combined total of the First Five-Year Plan and the Great Leap Forward, and it relocated almost four million workers to inland regions (p. 237). Nevertheless, the project was kept top secret to hide it from the world until 1978. In Mao's Third Front, which is the first English-language work on this important topic, Covell F. Meyskens utilizes an impressive array of new sources from China, including local archives, published and unpublished memoirs and...

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