Fu Dalin wears many epithets — professor, mentor, lawmaker, soldier — but he insists the first remains soldier. A veteran of the People’s Liberation Army who chose a military academy over civilian universities after topping his county’s liberal-arts exams in 1997, Fu now leads the military law discipline at the National Defense University’s Xi’an campus. His biography reads like a handbook for Beijing’s current drive to professionalize and operationalize legal expertise inside the armed forces: battlefield-facing courses, legal handbooks for units, and an expanding research agenda tightly tied to operational needs.
For more than two decades Fu has bridged theory and practice. He has published prolifically, supervised doctoral students, and taken part in drafting or amending over 20 military laws and regulations. In 2019 his team accepted a high-profile legislative assignment — the first time it independently led such a national project — and turned a compressed timetable into a concrete body of work that later won a military scientific-technical prize and was folded back into classroom teaching.
That project exemplifies a larger institutional shift. Fu and his colleagues have spent years building what they term a military-action-law system: new courses and textbooks, a professional laboratory for operational legal training, what they describe as the country’s most complete international military-law database, and a series of practical outputs that include advisory reports used by central military organs. Research topics tied directly to combat-readiness rose from under 20% to more than 60% after the department was reorganized to serve wartime needs.
Pedagogy is a battlefield in itself. Fu has established a “gold course” standard that requires instruction to be both strategic — aligned with national defence objectives — and grounded in the realities of unit mission execution. He has pushed faculty out of lecture halls and into front-line units, naval task groups and remote garrisons so that teaching draws on live cases and so that legal instruction becomes an operational tool rather than an academic exercise.
The practical reorientation has been energetic. Fu’s team has undertaken more than 300 engagements with troops — from high-altitude outposts to fleet platforms — delivering legal advice, collecting wartime case material and converting those materials into simulation exercises and real-case teaching. Faculty who once wrote in isolation now return from deployments with concrete case files that shape classroom drills, turning mock exercises into adversarial, realistic rehearsals of legal decision-making under operational stress.
The shift matters because modern combat increasingly hybridizes law and force. Beijing’s military planners treat legal instruments as part of overall competition: rules, doctrines and legal arguments can shape operational space, manage risks and confer political legitimacy. Fu’s work signals a Chinese military confident in developing internal legal capacity to advise commanders, craft rules of engagement, and produce legal cover for overseas or gray-zone operations.
Yet this profile also serves a domestic audience. It is a portrait of professionalisation portrayed as patriotic service: a teacher-soldier who remains bookish in manner but uncompromising in purpose. That posture reinforces the party-state narrative that the PLA must be both loyal and modern — able to fight and to navigate the legal contours of contemporary conflict.
There are limits and caveats. Institutional legal capacity does not remove the primacy of political command, and a larger corps of military lawyers may be used to justify actions rather than constrain them. International audiences should watch for doctrinal publications, legal handbooks and embedded legal teams that could change how Beijing frames and executes operations abroad — and how it litigates them in diplomatic and legal arenas.
Fu’s line is simple: law has no smoke, but it is a weapon. His work illustrates a broader Chinese effort to make legal competence an integral element of military power — not an afterthought but part of the force’s toolkit for protecting and advancing national interests.