Ordinary Life Within an Extraordinary Project: Demystifying the Third Front

Since its launch in the 1960s, the Third Front has undergone a major discursive transformation, from military secret under Mao Zedong and economic anachronism under Deng Xiaoping to industrial heritage under Xi Jinping. In the early twenty-first century, commemorative discourse presents this military-industrial complex of China’s hinterlands as an extraordinary project within which workers led extraordinary lives. While not disputing this project’s extraordinary ambition and scale, this article draws on fieldwork and late twentieth-century textual sources to argue that many aspects of Third Front everyday life only appear extraordinary—and become heritage-worthy—when viewed through the lens of contemporary urban life. In contrast, when examined alongside the wider danwei (work unit) system, the Third Front everyday appears extraordinary not as a radical departure from Maoist industrial practices but rather as the ambitious extension of these practices into inhospitable terrain. Approaching the Third Front from this perspective, this article argues, can help to demystify its legacy and situate it alongside existing research on the danwei.