China analysts have told The Epoch Times that the ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has reactivated its Cold War-era “Third Front Construction” project as part of its war preparation with the United States.

This comes amid reporting by international media revealing secret nuclear weapons sites in a county in southwest China.

According to a recent investigative report by CNN, satellite imagery analysis, corroborated by letters that Chinese villagers sent to local officials and government documents, revealed that some villages in China’s southwestern Sichuan Province have been demolished over the past three years. In their place stand newly constructed nuclear weapons production facilities and an entirely new road network connecting multiple nuclear bases. This indicates that the Chinese military is undertaking a significant expansion of the nuclear weapons network surrounding Zitong County in Sichuan, according to the report.

The “Third Front Construction” project was the CCP’s wartime preparation strategy implemented during the Cold War. It was initiated by then-CCP leader Mao Zedong in 1964 to counter potential external military strikes by relocating industries into the secluded mountainous regions of western China.

Under this initiative, China’s “First Front” comprised the coastal areas, the “Second Front” covered the central interior, and the “Third Front” encompassed the deep hinterlands of the southwest and northwest. To guard against potential attacks by the United States or the Soviet Union, the CCP sent tens of millions of people to relocate or construct key military factories, defense industries, and infrastructure within these hidden mountainous zones.

After Mao died in 1976, and as relations with the United States warmed, the “Third Front Construction” project ended in 1980, while the regime focused on economic and industrial development along coastal regions in the east and southeast during its policy of “reform and opening up.”

However, in recent years, as CCP leader Xi Jinping moved away from the “hide our strength and bide our time” policy of the 1990s to 2000s—taking a more aggressive stance in foreign policy—the CCP has increasingly found itself at odds with the outside world.

In 2024, the CCP released its “Western Development Strategy” as the regime’s State Council announced plans to “guide capital-intensive, technology-intensive, and labor-intensive enterprises to relocate from the eastern region to the central and western regions”—specifically to the country’s hinterlands. China-based media also reported that 1,500 factories in southern Guangdong Province were set to relocate to western provinces such as Sichuan.

The CCP has reactivated its strategic plan to develop its western regions to serve three objectives, Su Tzu-yun, a researcher and director of the Division of Defense Strategy and Resources at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research, told the Chinese-language edition of The Epoch Times.

“First, it aims to bolster the regime’s resilience in the face of Western economic sanctions,” he said.

Second, “should the southeastern coastal region come under counterattack, the western inland region would serve as an internal industrial base.”

Third, it seeks to counter U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariff war, Su said.

“Specifically, if the western region development plan proceeds successfully, it could—through overland transport via the China-Europe Railway—strengthen trade and economic ties with Europe, thereby offsetting the impact of U.S. tariffs.”

Su pointed out that Xi will not abandon the objective of annexing Taiwan by force.

The CCP has been preparing for “an all-out war against the United States,” Yuan Hongbing, a Chinese legal scholar living in exile in Australia who has informants in the CCP’s upper echelons, told The Epoch Times. “The CCP’s nuclear arsenal serves as the strategic focal point and the final point of support of its military readiness.”

Yuan said CCP insiders have told him that China’s total nuclear arsenal has now reached nearly 3,000 warheads. The Epoch Times cannot independently verify this information. The Pentagon’s 2025 report to Congress estimates that the People’s Liberation Army is on track to have more than 1,000 operational nuclear warheads by 2030, based on what is known about China’s inventory of fissile materials.

Since 2024, 10 defense industrial experts who are academicians of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have been expelled and removed from their positions.

These individuals include Xiao Longxu, a missile expert at the Rocket Force Research Institute; ballistic missile weapons expert Cao Jianguo; Jin Donghan, former director and chief engineer of the 711 Research Institute under the China Shipbuilding Industry Corporation; Luo Qi, chief engineer of the China National Nuclear Corporation; Liu Cangli, president of the China Academy of Engineering Physics; radar expert Wu Manqing; missile guidance and control expert Wei Yiyin; and nuclear weapons engineering expert Zhao Xiangeng.

Yuan said that according to information currently circulating within Beijing’s official circles, the reason for the purge is that “these CCP’s military-industrial scientists had colluded to deceive Xi Jinping.”

“Through a series of fraudulent schemes, they have misappropriated research funds. Consequently, the ‘state-of-the-art weapons’ they have produced entirely lack actual combat capabilities,” Yuan said.

U.S. military operations in Venezuela and Iran this year have shown that China-supplied weaponry has been utterly useless against U.S. military equipment, Yuan said.

Su noted that while China-made weaponry has made some progress over the years, “it undoubtedly contains a certain amount of deficiencies and remains no match for the technological accumulation the United States has built up over the past 60 years.”