From Space to Society: Workers’ Clubs and Collective Life in China’s Third Front Era
This paper focuses on the workers’ clubs built during China’s “Third Front Construction” (Sanxian jianshe) in the 1960s and 1970s. The Third Front Construction was a massive state-led program launched in 1964 at the height of the Cold War, aimed at relocating and building strategic industries—including defense, energy, machinery, and petrochemicals—in the mountainous interior regions of Southwest and Central China. In these newly established industrial communities, the workers’ club emerged as the most distinctive type of public building. It not only provided cultural, recreational, and educational functions but also served as a crucial arena for political mobilization and ideological education, embodying the socialist vision of collectivism through spatial practice. Methodologically, the study combines architectural typology with oral history. On the one hand, typological analysis of representative cases reveals the evolutionary trajectory of workers’ clubs—from open-air theaters and multifunctional dining halls to large, purpose-built complexes—while also identifying common features in their plan layouts, façade compositions, and symbolic decorations. On the other hand, oral history materials from former participants and residents reconstruct the lived experience of these clubs, highlighting their role in labor competitions, propaganda performances, model opera rehearsals, and everyday leisure, thereby uncovering their dual function as sites of political ritual and routinized social practice. The findings show that the spatial transformation of workers’ clubs was driven by intertwined political, economic, and social factors. Under the imperatives of collectivism and wartime preparedness, the clubs functioned as instruments of mobilization and education. Economic constraints gave rise to flexible “one-space, multiple-use” models, while the normalization of production and rising cultural demands in the 1970s led to multifunctional, composite spaces. Their design and construction reflected both standardized Soviet-influenced design catalogues and prefabricated modular systems, as well as pragmatic, site-specific adaptations to local terrain and materials. Socially, the workers’ clubs institutionalized everyday life in Third Front communities. Through synchronized work-rest schedules and collectivized leisure activities, individuals were drawn into overlapping daily routines that fostered collective subjectivity and group identity. As such, the workers’ clubs embodied the correspondence between material space and social space, demonstrating how architecture served as a vehicle of state ideology while also crystallizing into collective memory through repeated practice. The paper concludes that workers’ clubs hold dual significance as both architectural and social history. They represent a hybrid of standardization and localization in China’s modern architectural development, while simultaneously serving as symbols of emotional attachment and communal identity for the “Third Front generation.” In the context of contemporary heritage discourse, these clubs should be recognized as valuable cultural assets. Their preservation and adaptive reuse require collaboration between local communities and professional practitioners, ensuring that historical memory and cultural spirit are sustained while new social functions and spatial vitality are introduced.