In a decorated hall at the end of 2025, an awards ceremony felt less like a celebration of individuals and more like a strategic announcement. The Information Support Force brigade that convened its eighth annual “Most Beautiful Beijiang People” awards did not simply honour familiar faces who had kept communications lines running for decades; it elevated engineers, systems designers and architects of new operational models whose work underpins the People’s Liberation Army’s drive to reshape how it fights.
The contest’s most contentious case summed up the shift. A veteran station chief who had guaranteed ‘‘zero interruptions’’ in a remote outpost for 15 years stood alongside Li Chengshan, a senior engineer whose team had just completed the 113th attempt to integrate a domestically produced switching chip into a critical exchange. The brigade leadership opted to recognise both kinds of service but tilted the honour toward the project that pointed to future operational independence rather than to past reliability.
The choice was more than sentimental. It was an explicit signal about what counts in a force undergoing deep change: resilience by rote remains essential, but now the premium is on indigenisation, technical breakthroughs and risk‑taking in contested technological domains. Li’s story — whiteboards covered in erased formulas, nights of failed runs and a final green panel of lights — became the anecdote used to explain a new standard of service: not only keeping systems up but ensuring those systems cannot be denied by external sources.
Other awardees embodied the same continuum. An engineer who managed a seamless system migration while falling ill, a drill sergeant who shaved seconds from procedures to meet imagined wartime stresses, and a planner who sketched a new force‑grouping model on a ‘‘blank sheet’’ all received recognition. Their stories were threaded together at the ceremony as part of a continuous culture: when the organisation says ‘‘we need you to do this,’’ the immediate response is ‘‘we will.’’ The narrative links the craftsmanship of older generations with the experimental posture demanded by modern, networked operations.
What makes this internal ritual noteworthy to outside observers is the ancillary institutional architecture the brigade has built around innovation. The leadership described ‘‘green channels’’ for priority resourcing of technical projects, ‘‘frontier’’ funds that allow for trial and error, and ‘‘innovation studios’’ at the grassroots for disseminating field ideas. Those mechanisms matter because they convert rhetorical preference for modern capabilities into concrete incentives: faster funding, tolerance for early failure, and routes for prototypes to enter exercises and doctrine.
An example from recent multi‑service training underlines the practical payoff. During a wargame, a critical command link was disrupted and a planned switch to a backup channel took too long. A staff officer recalled a ‘‘dynamic elastic grouping’’ trial idea and improvised a cross‑domain direct link. The chain reconstituted quickly and the manoeuvre recovered. Officers credited the success not to a single person but to an environment that had produced, tested and made available alternative concepts in peacetime.
For analysts outside China, the ceremony provides a small but revealing window into the PLA’s internal signalling. Celebrating engineers and conceptual pioneers shows a high priority on technological self‑reliance and on changing the cultural payoff structure inside units so that innovation and experimentation carry prestige. It also suggests Beijing is trying to institutionalise learning cycles that turn ideas into doctrinal options rather than keeping them trapped in test labs.
That does not mean the transition is complete. Awards and incentives can accelerate cultural change, but they do not erase supply‑chain vulnerabilities, industrial bottlenecks or the time it takes to integrate new systems across large formations. External pressures — export controls, restricted access to advanced semiconductors and Western tooling — make domestic breakthroughs harder and more costly, even as they increase the strategic urgency of success.
Still, the brigade’s awards reveal something the PLA wants friends and rivals to understand: a force that publicly honours those who chip away at dependency and those who draw first drafts of future battle formations is moving beyond slogans. It is reshaping the internal rewards that will determine which skills and behaviors proliferate across its ranks, with consequences for how quickly new concepts translate into operational effects.