Bill proposes for all Chinese high schoolers to receive military training | Hacker News Reader

Bill proposes for all Chinese high schoolers to receive military training

asia.nikkei.com

35 pointsOgsyedIE37 comments

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.

I feel like teaching the peasants how to fight only greases the revolution wheels if they aren't actually doing anything to fix the other problems.

Every male adult had to serve 2 years in the military in the Eastern Bloc. Yet those regimes were pretty stable.

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...

Not exactly what I would call "pretty stable"

40 years is a really long time. For a lot of us, that covers the remainder of our lives.

A regime with a lifespan such that people entering young adulthood when it is founded also watch it fall has not lasted a really long time.

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.

https://database.earth/population/germany/life-expectancy#:~....

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.

Ergo, the East Bloc was not a stable system.

Those regimes lasted only 45 years -- and the leader (Ceaușescu) of one was executed along with his wife.

Keep those male 20-somethings occupied.

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.

It’s ok to say it out loud. China is preparing for war.

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.

Time for another long march, eh?

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"

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?

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]

[1] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%99%AE%E9%80%9A%E9%AB%98%E7...

[2] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%99%AE%E9%80%9A%E9%AB%98%E7...

[3] https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E8%BB%8D%E8%A8%93_(%E4%B8%AD%...

They also recently completed the largest field hospitals and military/civilian bunkers across from the strait.

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.

Well, germany infamously did this with the Hitler youth.

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.

Their DOSAAF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOSAAF was a hybrid of Junior ROTC, rifle training, and military sports.

Two seconds of research reinforced my hunch.

Nazi Germany, USSR, Iran, North Korea, Russia, just to name a couple

Or does something like regular pledge to a symbol, be it a flag or religious one... Feels like fascism to me...

Yeah, I completely agree. That’s kinda disturbing too, but to a much lesser degree.

There’s a qualitative difference between “be proud of your country” and “we will now prepare to vanquish the enemies of the motherland”

America should as well. Mandatory military service means it’s not just the poor and those without other choices that serve.

At one point in the 1920s the US was planning to put everybody through a short boot camp at age 18 and then release them to be Reservists.

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.

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