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.

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 long-term transformation of mono-industrial cities has become a critical issue in sustainable urban development, particularly where urban growth was initially shaped by state-led industrialization and strategic security concerns. This paper examines China’s Third Front Construction, a large-scale Cold War programme that relocated industrial and defence facilities to inland regions, through a paired comparison of Yuan’an and Xiaogan in Hubei Province. Focusing on Base 066 as a city-forming enterprise, the study combines archival research, local gazetteers, factory records, field investigation, historical satellite imagery, and urban morphological analysis to examine how policy shifts reshaped urban form, industrial layout, infrastructure, and public facilities. The findings show that Yuan’an developed as a dispersed, mountain-based industrial enclave structured by concealment, air defence requirements, and work unit organization, whereas Xiaogan evolved into a more compact and integrated urban industrial district after the relocation of Base 066. This transformation changed not only production space but also urban–rural relations, residential organization, and public service provision. The study demonstrates that Third Front cities should be understood as policy-produced urban systems whose later decline or integration reflects the changing relationship between security, industry, and urban sustainability. It further suggests that industrial heritage, adaptive reuse, and intercity memory networks can support the regeneration of former mono-industrial settlements.

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.

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.