Why more young Chinese have military academies in their sights

High youth unemployment rate, a rise in patriotism, and incentives like subsidised tuition fees are fuelling interest in the PLA

Reading Time:3 minutes

China’s military struggled to attract enough recruits in the years before the pandemic, when the job market was strong. Photo: Handout

Published: 12:00pm, 23 Jun 2025

China’s military academies are seeing growing interest from students as the government offers incentives such as subsidised tuition fees to attract more young recruits and as rivalry with the United States drives patriotism.

The defence ministry’s announcement last month that three new military academies would start recruiting high school graduates from this summer has been viewed more than 8 million times on social media platform Weibo. Many users said they were excited to have the opportunity to serve their country.

The new academies are the People’s Liberation Army Ground Force Service Academy in Hefei, Anhui province; the PLA Information Support Force Engineering University in Wuhan, Hubei; and the PLA Joint Logistics Support Force Engineering University in Chongqing.

But recruitment will not be expanded – the total number of new recruits will be “basically the same” as last year, the ministry said, without elaborating.

The new academies have incorporated some units from existing military schools. Those mergers are part of a restructure of the military education system in recent years, which the ministry said was being done to create a “more efficient and higher quality” system for nurturing talent and to achieve what it called a “core need for war preparation”.

The ministry has also scrapped the requirement for military academy students to have three years of work experience before they can become commanders. From this year, students can sit postgraduate entrance exams to follow this career path immediately after they graduate from a military academy.

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