Chinese society is rapidly militarising

The reports in China’s state media speak about ‘advancing national defence education in the new era’, teaching students to be ‘disciplined’, and ‘promoting the spirit of hard work and inspiring patriotism’. But behind the stultifying Communist party jargon is a new law that will force school children to undergo miliary training and which marks another step towards a militarisation of Chinese society on a scale not seen since the days of Mao Zedong.

The revised ‘law on national defence education’, now before China’s rubber-stamp parliament, proposes mandatory military drills for middle school pupils aged 12 to 15 and says that defence should be studied even at primary school. Ritualised military-style exercises are not unusual in China’s schools and colleges, but enforcement has typically been patchy and perfunctory, greeted with limited enthusiasm by students or by parents who can be highly protective as a result of the country’s now abandoned one-child policy.