Mao’s Third Front: The Militarization of Cold War China by Covell F. Meyskens (review)

[...]as the rest of the book brilliantly shows, although “cold war” (lengzhan 冷战) had never been part of the everyday vocabulary of the Third Front participants, their career trajectories, their family lives, and the changing ways in which they found meaning in life and self-worth in work were all part and parcel of the human story of the Cold War and should not be studied in isolation from the expanding field of global Cold War history. While highlighting the extraordinary perseverance of the Third Front laborers under primitive conditions, Meyskens also shows that, compared with the inhabitants of rural China, the Third Front workers experienced “privileged hardship” in the sense that they benefited from a “robust welfare safety net” provided by the state that granted them access to housing, education, medical services, and modern infrastructure such as electricity, paved roads, and automobiles (188–89). [...]while the Maoist social engineering project successfully produced many “socialist workaholics” who upheld the principle of “serving socialism first,” work discontent, divertissement, and foot-dragging were also common (183, 191). The “yearning to secure a richer material life” and the “ardor to safeguard socialism from China’s Cold War rivals” were not mutually exclusive but jointly shaped workers’ decisions to devote their lives to the Third Front in equally powerful ways (31).