Soldiers of the one-child era: are they too weak to fulfill Beijing's military ambitions?
With 70pc of soldiers from one-child families, many wonder if they could cope on battlefield
No one knows the real fighting capability of the People’s Liberation Army, but the fact that more than 70 per cent of China’s soldiers come from one-child families raises questions about how well prepared these troops would be for the horrors of battle.
“I was a spoiled boy as I am an only child. In my first year in the army, after a hard day’s training I’d hide under my blanket and cry every night because I missed home and my girlfriend,” Dalian native Sun Youpeng, who joined the PLA after graduating from university at the age of 22 in 2010, told the South China Morning Post.
Past reports from the PLA Daily tell of recruits spitting red ink to feign sickness and escape the tough training.
The one-child policy has also stirred discussions among Japanese and South Korean media as tensions ratchet up over territorial disputes surrounding the Diaoyu Islands, or Senkakus as they are called in Japan. A report in the Korea Times in December proclaimed “the PLA would be defeated by Japan’s Self-Defence Forces if the Diaoyu conflict [happened] because most Chinese soldiers are spoiled little emperors and queens”.
Professor Liu Mingfu from the PLA National Defence University told Nanfang Weekly that at least 70 per cent of PLA soldiers were from one-child families, and the figure rises to 80 per cent among combat troops.
In an open report to the central government in 2012, Liu stressed that sending a Chinese family’s only son to battle had been taboo since ancient times. He pointed to the example of the US military’s sole survivor policy, introduced after the five brothers of the Sullivan family were killed during the sinking of the cruiser USS Juneau in the Pacific during the second world war.