As a strategic adjustment to China’s national defence, economic and construction policy for military purposes, the ‘Third Front’ construction programme (1964–1980) had a profound impact on the country’s industrial layout and urban-rural relation. The built environment of this era represents the spatial orientation and strategy of China’s ‘road to socialism’ during the Cold War. Through a historical review and field investigation, this study summarises the characteristics of Third Front construction with reference to the ‘new socialist industrial mining bases’ that emerged from the paradigm shift in China’s urban planning. By analyzing spatial patterns and the language of spatial design from a historical perspective, this study sheds light on China’s socialist architectural and planning discourse and supplements the existing scholarship on Cold War architectural historiography.

Public policy for the preservation and development of traditional villages in China has witnessed a shift. That is from the equal distribution of finances to officially recognised traditional villages to the prioritisation of the development of more potential traditional villages that stimulate the development of surrounding villages and regions. This study takes 206 traditional villages in Hubei Province as an example and proposes a method framework for ‘Feature identification, Hierarchical classification (FIHC) that combines field research, spatial geography and spatial network methods. The results of spatial geography show that traditional villages in Hubei province are unevenly distributed, mainly along the mountain ranges in the east and west, with scattered distribution in the central plains. The kernel density result reveals “3 + 2 high-density hotspot zones” (A, B, and C are high-density areas, whereas D and E are low-density areas). Furthermore, the results of the spatial network appear that the traditional villages’ ecological situation in Zone A is better than in other areas, but their transportation accessibility and economy are poor; Zone B villages’ transportation accessibility is better than in other areas; Zone C has the best economy; and three conditions of traditional villages in the D and E zones are poor. FIHC can identify villages with more development potential and stratify these villages in a multidimensional way. It is innovative and an important contribution to policymakers and planners in developing ‘phased and focused’ public policies and rural planning.

With the accelerated urbanization and frequent occurrence of climate extremes, the regional ecosystem service level has ushered in a great challenge, and the resilience of the ecological network has gradually weakened, leading to lower ecological benefits and production levels. As a core ecologically sensitive area in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River, Wuhan metropolitan area has been expanding outward with rapid urbanization, crowding out surrounding arable and ecological land, and facing serious challenges to the sustainable development of the national space, while current cross-regional ecological protection measures need to be strengthened urgently, and exploring the structural resilience of its ecological network is of great significance to promote regional stability. In this study, Wuhan metropolitan area is taken as an example, and we explore the evolution and laws of ecological network structure from the perspective of network analysis by constructing ecological networks in Wuhan metropolitan area in 2000, 2010, and 2020. Firstly, we select regions from the ecological control line developed in China as ecological source sites, and also select multivariate data to supplement them. Then, the ecological network was established using the MCR model. Finally, network analysis was applied to discuss the evolution of network structure under multiple times and propose corresponding conservation strategies. The results show that (1) the major ecological resistance of Wuhan urban area has increased by 5.24% in 20 years. (2) The centrality and connectivity of the network nodes have increased over the 20-year period, and the overall structure of the network has stabilized and the resilience of the network has increased. (3) There is a strong link between changes in the network as a whole and local resilience. The results of the study will help analyze the relationship between the network as a whole and the region, and provide reference for optimizing the ecological network and constructing the systematic management of ecological security pattern.

In the early 1960s, Architectural Journal [建筑学报], one of China’s most respected architectural periodicals, shifted its focus from Soviet and Western architecture to tropical architecture in the Global South. Based on their similar encounters in history, China and other countries in the Global South have formed mutually supportive relationships. Taking the above-mentioned shift in Chinese architectural research as a starting point, this article uses publications from Architectural Journal and related books between the 1960s and the 80s as a clue to illustrate the trajectory of China’s early tropical technoscientific network during the Cold War. By analysing relevant projects in China’s southern regions and the Global South countries, the authors depict the production and exchange of tropical knowledge between domestic and international architectural development. The authors argue that, in the process of the country’s engagement with tropical countries via architecture during Mao’s era, China has exported its indigenous low-tech, low-cost, and rapid construction methods to the tropical regions while absorbed knowledge related to tropical architecture to promote climate-responsive design and domestic architectural development.

The Third Front construction (1964–1980), emerging as a significant national strategic decision tailored to the geographical landscape of China during the Cold War period, represents the interplay of strategy and spatial positioning under the influence of strategic preparedness factors. The influence of the military principle of ‘dispersal and concealment in the mountains’ has necessitated a specialized consideration in the planning and construction of Third Front factories and mining bases on how to closely integrate with complex terrain. During this period, it ushered in new architectural paradigms and technological explorations and profoundly influenced the design methods, architectural standards, and architectural education of modern Chinese architecture at that time. Using Architectural Journal (建筑学报) and relevant archives from the 1960s to the 1980s, this paper examines early China’s exploration of mountain architecture and other areas of Chinese architectural engineering and technical scientific networks. This paper illuminates the development of Chinese modern architecture from a new and hitherto underexplored perspective, enriching the historical narrative and theoretical understanding of China in Cold War architectural history. It also provides practical insights into the current ‘new Cold War’ situation.

The Third Front Construction (1964–1980) relocated major industrial and defence capacity to China’s inland regions under acute geopolitical tension. Existing scholarship has reconstructed the campaign’s political economy and built legacy, but has paid less attention to how architectural knowledge was produced when established planning models were rendered inadequate by mountainous terrain, secrecy, material scarcity, and compressed construction schedules. Guided by the principle “dispersal and concealment in the mountains, and, when necessary, retreating into caves” (靠山、分散、隐蔽、必要时进洞), this study examines how designers received, tested, adapted, circulated, and institutionalized knowledge through Third Front practice. It triangulates archival plans and drawings, technical reports, professional periodicals, standard-design catalogues, field surveys, and oral-history accounts, using Hubei’s industrial units as primary cases and projects in Sichuan, Yunnan, Guizhou, and Hunan as comparisons. The article argues that geopolitical and geographic constraints functioned not only as limitations but also as epistemic conditions. Soviet-derived industrial planning was translated from concentrated, standardized layouts into dispersed, terrain-responsive systems; local materials and construction techniques became sources of situated design knowledge; and project experience circulated through design institutes, journals, internal reports, textbooks, codes, and standard drawings. Through these linked processes, provisional solutions were converted into an institutionalized body of expertise in mountainous industrial planning and underground construction. This framework recasts the Third Front from a history of isolated projects as a history of architectural knowledge under constraint, while also exposing the costs of that knowledge regime, including over-dispersal, low construction standards, and long-term safety and operational problems. The study contributes to histories of Cold War architecture by showing how strategic urgency reorganized the production, reception, and authority of design knowledge.