It's an employment program. Unemployment is massive and reported. In the less populated provinces it's devastating. They are trying desperately to avoid a revolution.
Not that I believe that conscription causes revolution, but if by "The Eastern Block" you mean the Warsaw Pact countries in Central and Eastern Europe, those regimes lasted about 40 years before being overthrown by revolution...
40 years is not a "really long time" when talking about how long a system of government should survive.
It's well under a lifetime, and is around the number of years people in the US expect to work before retirement.
Taking just the GDR for example, statistically anyone who was born around the years of its founding went on to outlive that government by another 20-25 years.
You can't really call a government stable if basically everyone born into it is expected to outlive it.
And independently of the question of whether or not 40 years is a "long time", the fact also remains that Warsaw Pact Germany, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia had large scale uprisings in the 1950s and 1960s which were violently put down by the Soviet military.
If that is the goal, then this course of action may be counterproductive. Military service may increase the sense of entitlement among youths, who will still face unemployment after the training is over.
I’m sure this has no meaning given other similar changes taking place in China, and does not need to be viewed in a wider context of militarization, because it will have no impact on the unfolding of our collective futures.
I am curious how this will play out. How does starting a war with your largest economic market help you in the long run? If the US and Europe stop buying from China it will end their economy. Do they have enough customers in Russia, India, unaligned countries?
Sad to say but I understand them. They don't want to end up like the young Yugoslavian Republic, weak and shattered for ever because of US "interventionism"
Wasn’t it more like they got soft after Mao even Deng?
They used to have hotwars with Vietnam, skirmishes with Russia and India. They’d send brigades to the countryside to engage in community driven building of whatever, backyard smelters, canal digging, earthworks, etc. they’d let up a few decades, but people are getting too bourgeois for their own good and need some taste of country proletariat.
> little to no history of conquering other countries for centuries.
Tibet would like a word.
> They will not try to attack Taiwan after the way the world reacted to the invasion of Ukraine.
They may attack Taiwan if Ukraine falls. That would reveal the limits of the world's ability or endurance at supporting such countries. (Except for the economic sanctions. China might think twice about those.)
To note, military training also gives the government more control over the younger generation, albeit at a cost (which can also be beneficial to the army, in term of budget increase, and count as GDP as money flows around).
Aside from actually going to war, there can be many benefits for a government like China.
2-3 weeks of military training for beginning (middle- and) high-schoolers has been tradition for over 100 years since the founding of ROC.[1] PRC simply inherited the same tradition which also exists in Taiwan.[2][3]
I think it’s mildly disturbing when a country feels the need to mind control it’s citizens enough that they start military education from elementary school.
I don’t really know if I’ve heard of that happening anywhere else.
I deliberately left that reference out. It was the one that came to mind though. It’s always the facist states that do it (fair, that’s kinda the whole fascist schtick, but still)
Well, after, 2 seconds of cursory research Looks like the societ Union had youth military education programs.
Not surprising at all, seeing as I have never heard a satisfying distinction between fascism and communism. What ends up being described is blanket totalitarianism, every time.
So they finally started to legalize what’s in practice since the 90s. These were norms for middle schools, high schools, and universities years after what happened in the Tiananmen Square.
Not sure why this comment is all the way down here. I lived in China for ~3 years and they had military training bi-weekly in the school next to where I lived. Watching their marches and coordination scared me. Looked robotic and unnatural.
