Thread: Here is my attempt to bridge the China and Japan history fields which often operate in parallel and occasionally meet. My recent book provides another way to understand the consequences of US military activities in Asia during the Cold War. 1 https://twitter.com/nick_kapur/status/1275101454215385088

It examines the massive top-secret military industrial complex built in the mountains of inland China which the CCP hoped to keep hidden from US and Soviet bombers. Mao named this the Third Front. 2

While American military bases became more entrenched in Japan's security infrastructure after the Anpo protests, the CCP poured huge funds into building the Third Front's arsenal of Chinese socialism. 3

Third Front received more government investment than any other developmental initiative of the Mao era, and yet this huge industrial war machine, which saw the mobilization of fifteen million people, was not officially acknowledged for over a decade and a half. 4

Drawing on archival documents, memoirs, & oral interviews, my book provides the first history of the Third Front. It shows how the militarization of Chinese industrialization linked millions of everyday lives to the Cold War, merging global geopolitics with local change. 5

Hopefully as historians like @historianjennie and @nick_kapur write the social history of Cold War Japan, and historians begin to write the social history of Cold War China, scholars will be able to write histories that encompass both. 6 END