In mid-February a small family completed a 40-hour, thousand-kilometre pilgrimage into the frozen depths of the Daxing'anling range to spend the Lunar New Year with a husband and father who has spent nearly two decades guarding China’s northern frontier. Yan Liyun and her two daughters left Shanxi’s Huairen and endured four changes of transport—car, high-speed rail, overnight train and hard-seat carriage—before arriving at the border garrison in Aershan, Inner Mongolia, where Chen Fujun and his comrades met them at the national boundary after a patrol.
Chen, who has served for 19 years in the triangular-mountain (Sanjiaoshan) border post under the Northern Theater Army, combines routine patrol duties with the often-overlooked tasks of keeping a remote garrison’s water, power and heating systems running through long winters. Yan has shouldered family responsibilities at home—raising two daughters and caring for elderly relatives—while Chen repeatedly volunteered to remain on post through previous Spring Festivals. This year he prepared a different kind of gift: the hard-won time and space for a reunion in one of China’s most inhospitable military outposts.
The scene at Sanjiaoshan is threaded with memory and ritual. More than four decades ago a company commander, Li Xiangen, died saving a comrade; his widow planted a Korean pine at the post that soldiers call the “Xiangsi Tree” or ‘tree of longing.’ Chen and Yan were married beneath that tree twelve years ago, and the sapling’s continuing presence is invoked to tie present sacrifices to a longer lineage of border-service martyrdom and loyalty.
The vignette does more than humanise a military unit; it performs a message. Stories of arduous homecomings during the Lunar New Year are a staple of Chinese state media because they cast the People’s Liberation Army as disciplined, selfless and embedded in ordinary social rhythms. They also illuminate logistical realities that are rarely visible in headlines: the strain of long deployments, the technical burden of sustaining remote posts through harsh winters, and the emotional costs borne by families who live with repeated absences.
For foreign observers the image raises two practical points. First, China treats its northern third as a strategic space that requires long-term human presence as well as technology—soldiers who patrol, maintain infrastructure and symbolically mark sovereignty. Second, the state’s emphasis on such narratives is purposeful: in an era of heightened geopolitical attention to border regions, these stories bolster domestic confidence in the armed forces and help sustain recruitment and retention by valorising sacrifice as both patriotic and ordinary. The continued challenge will be aligning that narrative with tangible improvements in personnel welfare and rotation policies as the PLA modernises.