China Drafts Law to Require Military Training for Elementary School Children
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The Chinese Communist regime has drafted a law that would require military training for children all the way down to the elementary school level. If the legislation is approved, it could go into effect this year.
Nikkei Asia noted on Tuesday that some Chinese high schools and universities already require students to participate in basic military drills, some of which involve tanks, armored personnel carriers, hand grenades, and rocket launchers. Also, China’s conscription laws were amended in May 2023 to make all university students eligible for the draft.
The new law would require schools to include “defense education” in their budgets, make military training universal at the high school and college levels, and teach the “theory, knowledge, and skills associated with national defense” to even grade-school children.
There are several motives for China’s sudden interest in drafting children for military service, one of which is to frighten the Chinese population into believing they live under constant threat of attack, and only their authoritarian rulers can protect them. Chinese subjects are asking some awkward questions about their sputtering economy; the sight of their teenage children running around with hand grenades might alter their thinking.
The regime in Beijing is also eager to project military strength amid heightened tensions with Taiwan and the Philippines, and it wants to make young people seem like enthusiastic supporters of China’s aggressive agenda. Nikkei Asia quoted a state newspaper, the People’s Liberation Army Daily, claiming that military enrollment among university students has soared to over 1.2 million, thanks in part to hefty government incentives for military service.
In this handout photo provided by the Philippine Coast Guard, a Chinese coast guard ship uses water canons on a Philippine Coast Guard ship near the Philippine-occupied Second Thomas Shoal, South China Sea as they blocked its path during a re-supply mission on Saturday, August 5, 2023. The Philippine military condemned on Sunday a Chinese coast guard ship’s “excessive and offensive” use of a water cannon to block a Filipino supply boat from delivering new troops, food, water and fuel to a Philippine-occupied shoal in the disputed South China Sea. (Philippine Coast Guard via AP)
China is desperate to bring tech skills into the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), a goal that could be enhanced by making children comfortable with military careers from a very young age. The PLA needs more experts in artificial intelligence (AI), robotics engineering, and space technology, so it needs to recruit more students.
Iida Masafumi of the Japanese National Institute for Defense Studies pointed out that the PLA is immensely rich and powerful, so school administrators are eager to please it by maximizing “how many good students their schools can send to the military.”
Voice of America News (VOA) noted that the new law also centralizes military education with top Communist officials, including the Central Military Commission, whose titular head is none other than dictator Xi Jinping.
“The revisions also call on local military bases and central authorities to strengthen the direction, oversight and organization of military training for students,” VOA added.
RAND Corp. senior fellow Timothy Heath said the revised military education policies are nothing less than an effort by the nervous Chinese Communist Party to “legislate loyalty” during a “softening economy, worsening real estate market, and persistent corruption and malfeasance.”
“The law may aim in part to bolster recruitment for the PLA, which has consistently failed to attract adequate numbers of educated young people, despite high unemployment rates for urban youth,” Heath told VOA, sounding skeptical of the PLA’s claim that university students are breaking down the doors of its recruiting offices in their fervor to sign up.
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