| This dissertation aims to investigate the massive ongoing social changes in contemporary China, and their relationship to the current dominant discourses of modernity and economic reform, through a study of the transformation process from the 1960s to the early 2000s in one specific third front enterprise---Nanfang Steel in Sichuan province. Third-Front construction is one of the most essential industrializing projects initiated by the Chinese state in the inner land of China during 1960s, undertaken not only as a crucial part of the socialist modern national building process, but also, maybe more importantly, as an urgent response to the then turbulent international situation engendered/precipitated by the Cold-War. Within the grand project, numerous third-front enterprises/institutes had been built up, accompanied by a growth of fully functioning communities, even cities around them. This specific category of state-owned enterprises has experienced tremendous social changes since the economic reform. I trace the history of Nanfang from the days of its construction in the 1960s to the most recent reform period to investigate two distinct yet related processes: first, the ways in which the geo-political context in which the Third Front was initiated and, hence, its historical significance has been obfuscated within the current discourse of "economic reform", and second, the tremendous social consequence such reform has brought to the shop floor, the working class community and the lives of the workers in Nanfang. As I argue in this study, the result of the first process has been to exclude the Third Front communities from written History itself. It is important to note however that my concern here, is not to provide an apology for the Third Front, but rather to foreground the historical, geopolitical context in which the Third Front was conceived in the first place, in order to critically appreciate its importance, as well as to capture some of the devastating effects of the current regime of market reforms that began in the 1970s, but intensified more recently, on one Third Front complex, and the significance of the marginalization of the Third Front initiatives from current political discourse and historiography. |
