The revised National Defense Education Law emphasizes the importance of conscription.
The Chinese regime has revised its National Defense Education Law, which will take effect on Sept. 21.
The revisions allow the branches of the military of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), to station in universities, colleges, and high schools across China to conduct a nationwide military education and training program approved by CCP’s state council and the party’s central military commission for recruitment.
The second draft of the revised bill aims to “hone students’ willpower, enhance organizational discipline, and improve the level of military training.”
It requires that all agencies, institutions, organizations, and entities in society conduct national defense training.
The revision emphasized the importance of conscription. The article added to the newly revised law stipulates that “national defense education” in schools should be combined with “the promotion of military service” to enhance students’ “military service awareness.”
The CCP’s People’s National Congress rubber stamped on Sept. 13 the amendments to the National Defense Education Law that was originally enacted in 2001.
China’s state media have been propagating the strengthening of “national defense awareness” in recent years, citing CCP leader Xi Jinping as saying that the CCP has faced a “severe and complex international situation.” CCP authorities have repeatedly called for “preparing for dangers in peacetime” and “preparing for storms.”
Tensions over the Taiwan Strait have risen after repeated PLA incursions into Taiwan’s airspace and territorial waters, as well as threats to invade the self-ruled island nation.
Tensions between Beijing and Washington have also escalated over trade, technology, human rights, Beijing’s support of Russia’s war in Ukraine, U.S. support of Taiwanese sovereignty, and other issues.Retired Maj. Gen. Yu Tsung-chi in Taiwan, an adviser to the Formosa Republican Association, said he believes that the law was amended because Xi is actively preparing for war.
“It’s about how the CCP can quickly mobilize the entire country, especially young students, and how he can organize them to defend internal security and protect important infrastructure when a war breaks out,” he told The Epoch Times.
Currently, the PLA mostly relies on recruitment, and most of its troops are professional soldiers.
Yu said the CCP is now modernizing its military technology at a fast pace but that it lacks skilled personnel to operate sophisticated equipment.
“It seems to be deliberately mobilizing students from various universities and giving them military training in advance, so that when they graduate from university, they can take up positions in the military,” he said.
College graduates will be “the main source of high-quality personnel that are very important for the modernization of its entire national defense in the next stage.”
At the same time, Yu said ramping up recruitment could also solve the problem of worsening youth unemployment issue amid China’s sluggish economy to some extent.
The revised law emphasizes that national defense education should be guided by the CCP’s ideology, centered around “socialist core values,” and to “enhance the national defense awareness of all citizens.”
Yu said the CCP’s goal is to indoctrinate young Chinese people through military training and propaganda to have young people support the CCP and to make them serve the CCP in preparation for war.
The target of the CCP’s national defense education not only focuses on college students but also extends to high schoolers and children, Yu said, noting that it’s according to the Chinese regime’s principle that “national defense should start with the training of child soldiers.”
Military training for students and children is not meaningful for children, but it is very useful for the CCP, according to Cai Zhigang, a former PLA training instructor for college and high school freshmen.
“The CCP’s military training is mainly about teaching children how to be obedient,” he told The Epoch Times.
Military training in mainland schools includes physical training and instilling some ideological and political lessons to brainwash them, “telling them to love the country and the CCP.”
“Then, they are told to die and sacrifice for the party,” Cai said.
“This is basically the same as training of professional soldiers in the army.”
He said that when he was in the PLA, he saw that the CCP was always conducting ideological and political education of its troops.
“A large part of the political education was about saying that the military belonged to the CCP, not the country,” he said, noting that as a result, PLA soldiers have become the party’s guards, meaning that they are more a tool of repression against the Chinese people than an army.
Gao Hui and Yi Ru contributed to this report.