By comparing different historical narratives of the Third Front Construction that was built as a home‐front defensive industrial base against the threat of war from both the Soviet Union and the United States in the 1960s, this paper aims to explore a particular aspect of China's socialist history in a relational manner that contrasts but also connects past and present, archives and subjectivity, top‐down and bottom‐up perspectives. It is part of a larger effort to understand the complexity of China's socialist history and its relation to the present.