The mourning for a soldier killed in Lebanon shows that the western perception of China's army is long out of date, writes Fintan O'Toole
A large photograph of the thin, bespectacled face of Du Zhaoyu hung on the wall in the big ballroom of the Jingxi Hotel in western Beijing. Below it was the urn containing his ashes, resting on a pillow of white flowers and covered with the neatly folded hammer-and-sickle flag of the Chinese Communist Party. Two impeccably uniformed soldiers stood guard on either side as the minister for defence, Cao Gangchuan, delivered the eulogy before 1,000 guests from the military and foreign affairs establishments.
Last Monday's final memorial ceremony for the 34-year-old lieutenant colonel in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), who was killed when Israel bombed a UN observers' post in southern Lebanon, was the culmination of a series of solemn events, each one given large-scale coverage by Chinese newspapers and television stations: the reception of his body by his grieving widow at an Israeli airport; the arrival of the body in Beijing; the cremation of the remains at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in front of Du's family and friends, as well as Chinese President Hu Jintao and other senior leaders. There were further, more spontaneous, semi-private displays of mourning, such as the simple shrine, with his portrait, candles and flowers, erected at No 7 Middle School in Jinan in Shandong province, which Du had attended as a youth.
It all added up to a remarkable and evidently genuine expression of public grief. Remarkable, that is, in two respects. Firstly, that China's current military martyr, officially adopted as a hero to be emulated, died in the service of the international community, not committing an act of violence but, in the words of Cao Gangchuan's eulogy, "safeguarding world peace". And secondly, the large-scale public mourning for a single dead soldier marks a vast departure from the long-held western image of the Chinese army. Ever since the Korean War in the 1950s, when the PLA unleashed human waves of poorly armed, evidently dispensable troops in mass attacks on its enemies, apparently indifferent to the vast death toll, the western imagination has been haunted by the image of a teeming, relentlessly robotic Chinese army. Whatever germ of truth there may have been in that stereotype, the obvious public value placed on the life of Du Zhaoyu suggests that it is long out of date.
I recently had a long conversation with two middle-ranking officers in the PLA, both working in technical and logistical areas of the military. Neither wished to be named, and neither spoke in any kind of official capacity. I met them in a social context, but they knew that I am a journalist. They were obviously not going to disclose any military secrets, and I wasn't interesting in asking for any, but they were open, engaged, and willing to answer questions as honestly as they could within the constraints of their duties. Both are career soldiers in their early 40s with university degrees, articulate and animated.
ONE OF THE things they both stressed was that the sorrow over Du Zhaoyu's death is real and widely shared within the army. He was, at 34, younger than them, but in a similar mould - a well-educated military technocrat (he had a postgraduate degree), a product of the long-term policy of creating a smaller, more professional PLA. An army that had 4.75 million troops in 1981 is now less than half that size - a cut of 200,000 soldiers last year leaves it with around 2.3 million active personnel. The revolutionary, highly politicised organisation that emerged from the civil war of the 1930s and 1940s is in the process of attempting to transform itself into an efficient, high-tech operation. Men such as Du and my two interlocutors are a critical part of this effort, and in an era when the good soldier is not a faceless part of a machine but an intelligent professional, a sense of personal loss is possible.
According to the officers I spoke to, the Chinese army in general has mixed feelings about serving on UN missions.
"The army is, of course, under the control of the government and nobody questions that we have international responsibilities and duties. But frankly, Chinese soldiers are no more anxious than soldiers anywhere else to be exposed to danger in situations where they cannot defend themselves. We really don't want to see our people being killed or injured."
Nevertheless, of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, China is the largest contributor to UN missions, with almost 1,500 peacekeepers on duty in nine conflict zones. Du Zhaoyu was the eighth Chinese solider to be killed on UN duty since China started to contribute to peacekeeping in 1988.
Both of the officers I spoke to joined the army in the 1980s, when levels of pay and the prospects for promotion were very poor. When I asked if political indoctrination was a big part of their training, one of them laughed and said: "Of course. The less you're paid, the more important political indoctrination is. When things are tough, people need the motivation to keep them going."
Officers, he said, needed to have patriotic standing because they had little social prestige. Even as the economy was taking off and private wealth was growing, a general in the PLA couldn't afford to run a car on his salary. This has changed - one of the officers told me he earns about €400 a month, a decent enough wage by Chinese standards. Also transformed is the system of promotion. Most middle-ranking officers have to retire in their 40s, leaving the selected minority who survive with good prospects of achieving a higher rank.
So is political indoctrination still important?
"There's still a high degree of political education work," said one of the officers, "but you shouldn't imagine that we're all automatons who can't think for ourselves. People forget that the same tools that you learn to use in political education can also be used to develop your own ideas.
"Look, most of us are graduates. We're literate and in order to be good soldiers we have to understand what's going on in the world. So we think about things and discuss ideas and have our own opinions. We wouldn't be much good in a battle if we couldn't think. The officer corps is overwhelmingly supportive of the government and of the [ Communist] party. But we also know that China is rapidly evolving, that there's an unstoppable process of reform, and that things will change over time. The army's job is to protect the stability of the country while that process continues."
I RAISED, IN this context, the violent crushing of the Tiananmen Square demonstrations in 1989, when the army shot hundreds, possibly thousands, of unarmed civilians. One of the officers was in Beijing at the time. Was it true, I asked him, that many in the army were extremely reluctant to involve themselves in the suppression of civil dissent?
"Yes, that is true," he said. "Many officers were sympathetic to the demonstrators and more were not sure that it was the army's role to intervene in internal political disputes. But many of those who sympathised with the demonstrators changed their minds later. They were very upset by what happened, but the situation was not as simple as people in the West think it was. Was China ready to become a democracy in 1989? No. The process of reform was still young and fragile. So the choice was not between the system as it then was and a nice democratic outcome. It was between a system in the process of reform, and anarchy. This isn't to say that everything was done in the best way, but people found themselves in a situation where nobody quite knew the outcome of events. If you put an army on the streets in those confused circumstances, things are not going to be pleasant. Most of us now think that given the choices that were available at the time, the decision to end the demonstrations was the right one."
The legacy of that brutal assault on unarmed Chinese civilians, however, combined with the doubling of China's defence budget to $35 billion since the start of this century, creates a lingering fear that a resurgent China could become a military aggressor. I put these fears to the officers. They were broadly dismissive. "It's simply ridiculous to think that China could take on, say, the US in a military conflict. America is pretty open about its military might, maybe because it realises that it's so far ahead of everybody else, or maybe because it just likes to show it off, and many officers in the PLA have visited America and had contacts with the military there. We are modernising, but we're so far behind in terms of military technology that there's no prospect of catching up even over a few decades. Military spending in China is increasing, but then spending on everything in China is increasing, and the army is being modernised as part of the general reform process. Our spending is still only a fraction of what the US spends. And besides, you could say that in strictly military terms one of our weaknesses is that we actually haven't fought a war for nearly half a century. America and Britain have constantly tested their tactics and their technology in battle. Being at peace for so long, we haven't been able to do that."
"Our military doctrine," said the other officer, "is still very much based on the idea of the people's war in which the PLA would blend in with the general population to mount resistance. And that's an entirely defensive strategy. It's about fighting an aggressor, not being the aggressor. We're not going to invade anyone and we're not geared up to do so. China is more and more integrated into the rest of the world, through trade and diplomacy and closer relations with all our neighbours.
"OF COURSE IT'S an army's job to be prepared for eventualities, but it's very difficult to see circumstances in which it would be in China's interests to start a conflict." What about Taiwan, against which Chinese law allows aggressive military action in the event of a declaration of independence? "There would be a war with Taiwan only if Taiwan started it. China values stability above all, and that means that a conflict with Taiwan would be possible only if Taiwan destabilised the situation." But could a narrow, zealous nationalism come to dominate the army's thinking? "You need to remember," one of the officers said, "that the officer corps in the PLA is probably one of the more westernised groups in Chinese society. If you're in an army that's modernising itself, you have to be open-minded, to be engaged with technological change, to understand the ways in which the world is changing. Very many of us have been abroad and most of us have had contact with foreign people. Many of the senior leaders have children who are studying in the West. So you shouldn't imagine that we're inward-looking people. The army is patriotic, but being patriotic means wanting what's good for your country and your people. What's good for China is that it has a stable environment in which to continue to reform itself and become more and more prosperous."
Since my encounter with them was fairly casual, I have no way of knowing whether the two officers I spoke to are typical of the PLA, but equally there is no reason to think that they are untypical. China remains deeply scarred by its experiences of foreign domination in the 19th century and of an appallingly cruel Japanese invasion in the 20th century, and its national mindset is still shaped by a memory that wars tend to be horrible. The painful and difficult process of economic development has gone far enough for China's people to feel that they have a lot to lose in any serious conflict but not so far that China has any realistic aspirations to superpower status. And in the national mourning for Du Zhaoyu China is perhaps exploring the notion of a new kind of hero, a soldier who died for international peace.