On the lunar-calendar day that for many Chinese families marks home cooking and reunion, officers and soldiers from a brigade of the PLA's 78th Group Army drove more than a thousand kilometres to a village in Henan to sit down with the parents of Shen Liangliang, a young peacekeeper killed in Mali in 2016. The visit, held as the Spring Festival approached, is the latest in an unbroken chain of annual gestures that stretch back a full decade: signed flags, photo albums, warm meals and a practiced ritual of remembrance that has continued regardless of personnel turnover or organisational change.
Shen, who was posthumously awarded the national honorary title of "People's Hero" in 2019, died stopping a vehicle laden with explosives from breaching his peacekeeping camp. The brigade's representatives brought with them a company banner that had accompanied soldiers on flood relief, training and overseas missions, its surface now covered in the signatures and notes of successive generations of servicemen. The political instructor carefully pointed out names and short deeds on the flag — a thread that links the present unit with the man who once wore its uniform.
The visit mixed ceremony and domestic informality. Soldiers rolled up their sleeves to help Shen's mother make dumplings, recounted recent unit achievements and described how younger recruits had been moved by Shen's example. At the county martyrs' cemetery they cleaned Shen's gravestone and laid flowers; back in the house they left a thicker album, a signed flag and the promise of return next year, gestures that the parents say make them feel their son remains part of the battalion.
The routine is more than private consolation. Within PLA practice, public and institutional care for the families of the fallen is a disciplined tool for maintaining unit cohesion, morale and a narrative of sacrifice that supports both domestic legitimacy and professional pride. Ritualised visits, awards and visible commemorations bind a changing cohort of soldiers to traditions of service, communicating to recruits and communities that the state and armed forces will not abandon those who bear the cost of deployments.
That domestic function intersects with Beijing's wider foreign-policy posture. Chinese peacekeepers have become a visible element of China's international footprint, particularly in Africa and UN missions, and deaths overseas are politically sensitive: they humanise abstract strategic commitments and can provoke public debate. By institutionalising the care of martyrs' families and amplifying stories of heroism, the PLA manages both the reputational risks of expeditionary operations and the message that China is a responsible security actor that accepts sacrifice in the name of international peace.
The story of Shen Liangliang and the brigade that keeps returning to his village points to a pragmatic continuity at the heart of China's military: rituals and small acts of solidarity sustain political bonds between the armed forces and society. As China expands its overseas roles, those bonds will matter both for maintaining public support at home and for projecting an image of a disciplined, caring force abroad. The cost of expeditionary missions is real and visible in households like Shen's; how the state memorialises that cost will shape perceptions of the PLA for years to come.