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Chen Jiagang’s Third Front

Power Station

In 1964, China suddenly found herself without a friend. Fear of the Paper Tiger’s claws had already alienated her. But now the Soviet Union seemed less a big brother than a crafty svengali. Decisions made in panic are never advisable. At the level of national policy, they can be catastrophic. Fearing nuclear strikes from former friends or avowed enemies, China hastily shifted the bulk of her burgeoning industrial might from coast to southwest, to the rugged hinterland of Sichuan, Guizhou and Yunnan.

The new factories were safe in their geological fortress. But fortresses far too easily become prisons. In a preview of the upheaval soon to come, millions of coastal dwelling laborers and technicians were ordered to these fortresses, to hard labor at the end of China’s world, for China’s glory.

Chen Jiagang was there – worked in the factories, despaired for his and his comrades’ futures, and picked up the pieces when the dream for glory changed yet again. No patriot likes to examine recent history too closely. Artists, on the other hand, need to. The following photographs are the result of Chen Jiagang’s need to come to terms with what so many of us would just as soon consign to the bones moldering under the Great Wall. The women in the photographs have no easy explanation. If they did, they wouldn’t be there.