Besieged by the Japanese, the cavalry company ran out of ammunition and food. Covering the Chinese army’s withdrawal, they fought till just a handful of men remained.
Commander Sun Desheng raised his knife in the air and ordered an attack. He was the only survivor, although he had lost an arm.
Covered in blood, Sun raised his arm and rushed the enemy again.
This was a scene in a hit TV drama series “Liang Jian” (Raise the Sword), which told the story of farmers who became war heroes, the epitome of China’s military history.
“Even if we are outnumbered and besieged, we will raise our swords and fight till the last. This is the character of the Chinese soldier.” The line from the series was widely considered a great summary of the Chinese army spirit: courage and righteousness.
Blade of Victory
When the Red Army was established in 1927 after the Nanchang Uprising, nobody believed that a troop of just 20,000 would become a force that to be reckoned with.
They had confronted the Kuomintang army, which had millions of soldiers, the Japanese, who sought to conquer China in three months, and the United Nations troops led by the world’s top industrial power in Korea, and yielded to none.
It is an army willing to sacrifice. In October 1934, it was forced to abandon its revolutionary base and began the strategic maneuver that was later called the Long March. A month later, the commander, deputy commander, chief of staff, and the head of political department of the first regiment were all killed in a battle to cross a river. The division’s chief of staff volunteered to command the battle and was killed as soon as he arrived at the frontline. Three months later, Commander-in-Chief Zhu De led another fierce battle to cross a river. “I will sacrifice my life for the Red Army to succeed,” he said.
Fighting till the last second and the last person are recurrent themes in its history. In October 1938, eight women soldiers of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army killed themselves by jumping into a river after they ran out of ammunition and food. In 1941, five soldiers retreated to a cliff edge fighting the Japanese army. They fought with rocks after they ran out of ammunition. Outnumbered and besieged, they jumped off the cliff.
Many times, the army had to fight in harsh conditions. Their unswerving determination was astonishing. After Yang Jingyu, a founder and Commander of the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army, was killed in action, Japanese troops disemboweled his body and found grass, bark and cotton in his stomach. In the freezing battlefields of Korea, Chinese soldiers wore thin clothes and had little food. But they still attacked courageously, driven by what their enemies called a “mysterious Oriental spirit.”
The PLA Daily reported the Red Army lost 160,000 soldiers on the Long March, including more than 80 division commanders or officers of higher rank. More than 600,000 soldiers under CPC command died in the war against the Japanese invasion. During the civil war, the People’s Liberation Army lost 260,000 people, and about 1.04 million soldiers were injured. In the war in Korea, 180,000 Chinese soldiers died in battle.
Among the founding commanders of the People’s Republic of China, seven out of ten marshals and senior generals had been seriously wounded.
The museum of the PLA Academy of Military Science still preserves three pieces of shell fragment that remained in Colonel General Su Yu’s head until he died.
