A short clip on China’s military media this week reunited a symbolic past with the People’s Liberation Army’s present. Veterans and young soldiers stood shoulder to shoulder to sing “Jiù Wèi Dǎ Shèng Zhàng” (“Just to Win Battles”), invoking the name of Qiu Shaoyun, a Korean War-era figure who has long been held up by the Party as an exemplar of self-sacrifice and discipline.
The staging was spare but precise: uniforms pressed, faces forward, voices measured. The message is familiar inside China’s state media ecosystem — a claim that the PLA is inheriting a heroic tradition and translating it into contemporary combat readiness. The ritualized performance is less about melody than meaning: it frames individual devotion as the moral underpinning of collective military capability.
Qiu Shaoyun’s story — a private who is said to have withheld movement while burning to avoid revealing his unit’s position — has been a staple of Chinese civic and military education for decades. The Communist Party has repeatedly refurbished such narratives to bind military sacrifice to political loyalty, a useful tool at a time when the PLA is undergoing deep technological and organisational change while facing more frequent public scrutiny over its role.
The song’s title and chorus echo a slogan that has gained currency under Xi Jinping: the PLA must be capable of “fighting and winning” modern wars. Presenting this through film, song and ceremonial tributes serves two purposes at once. Domestically, it reinforces cohesion, morale and an ethic of unquestioning obedience. Externally, it signals a confident, disciplined force that prizes readiness and unity of purpose.
This particular piece should be read as choreography as much as news. China’s military media routinely packages professional self-image-building with emotional education: heroes past provide a convenient template to shape soldiers’ identity today. That pedagogy is significant because institutional culture — how a military understands sacrifice, command and obedience — matters as much as hardware when it comes to crisis behaviour.
For international observers, the performance is a reminder that the PLA’s modernisation is not only technical but cultural. Advanced satellites, missiles and cyber capabilities meet a political logic that prizes ideological reliability. The emphasis on hero-worship and ritualized pledges complements drills and procurement, reducing the risk of fragmentation in prolonged crises but also hardening a utilitarian view of human cost.
The broader context matters. China’s leadership has stepped up patriotic campaigns and military messaging alongside more varied and visible exercises in the East and South China Seas, and around Taiwan. While ceremonial songs do not change force posture by themselves, they are a low-cost means of marshaling public support and signalling to adversaries that the PLA’s leadership believes its forces are both ready and morally bound to achieve victory.
In short, what looks like a short morale-boosting segment is part of a larger, purposeful effort to align history, ideology and modern military aims. Watching troops sing a wartime anthem is less quaint commemoration than calculated statecraft: it cultivates a fighting identity the Party believes will matter when the ordinary instruments of deterrence are put to the test.