As the Lunar New Year approached, towns and civic groups across China loaded trucks with local delicacies, handwritten cards and practical supplies and sent them to border and coastal garrisons as part of a concerted "care for border and maritime defence" campaign. From Pu'er tea pressed into cartons to Xiamen pineapple cakes, from Sichuan noodles to steaming dumplings made at an arctic outpost, the gestures ranged from ceremonial to deeply personal and were explicitly intended to bring "the taste of home" to soldiers who remain on duty through the holiday.
Organisers included municipal governments, veterans' affairs offices, schools, factories and volunteer "military-mother" groups; children drew pictures and penned letters, tea workers packed new batches of Pu'er, and logistics teams coordinated convoys bound for remote posts. In Yunnan's Pu'er, the campaign solicited art and greetings to accompany parcels of local tea; Xiamen's shipment combined household items with city-specialty foods; and Deyang in Sichuan assembled 200 gift packs of regional preserved foods and noodles to send to frontline units.
The human dimension of the outreach was visible in small rituals as much as in crates of goods. In the Far Northeast, volunteer Zhu Chengrong and her team joined soldiers at cold outposts to make dumplings, chat and deliver handmade shoe insoles, an encounter one serviceman described as bringing "home's warmth to the coldest place." Such moments matter to units enduring long watches in austere conditions: the letters, children's drawings and familiar flavours are intended to reduce isolation and sustain morale.
The timing and breadth of the campaign underline its dual character. Spring Festival is the single most important holiday in China and the government is keenly aware of the symbolic cost of soldiers being away from family during the celebrations. At the same time, these activities mirror long-standing party and state priorities to bind civilians and armed forces together — strengthening loyalty, public trust and the legitimacy of local authorities that organise and publicise the relief.
There are also practical and strategic dimensions. Regularised, visible civilian support for frontier units helps maintain troop morale and social stability in peripheral regions, from northern Xinjiang outposts to island and coastal posts. The logistics of gathering, packing and transporting foodstuffs and letters highlights municipal capacity to mobilise society for the state's objectives, an administrative competence Beijing prizes when projecting resilience and internal cohesion.
For foreign observers, the gestures can be read in two ways: as routine, humane efforts to look after service members during a family-focused festival, and as part of a broader domestic narrative that emphasises unity behind the state's security apparatus. The activities are low-cost and high-salience, making them effective instruments for bolstering the image of a responsive state and an integrated civil-military community without altering military posture or doctrine.
These New Year campaigns are likely to persist as a fixture of China's internal governance: they provide immediate welfare benefits to soldiers, reassure communities that authorities care for their defenders, and create highly photogenic narratives for local and national media. In short, the parcels and hand-written notes do more than deliver food — they reinforce the social bonds that keep remote garrisons connected to the towns and cities they protect.