On a winding mountain road in Jiangxi’s Yushan region, former university students who served in the People’s Liberation Army have become the most visible adults at Baishi Primary School. Su Wangpeng, a veteran volunteer from Nanjing, drove nearly 1,000 kilometres and spent eleven hours to reach the school; his arrival dissolves the fatigue common to long-haul volunteers the moment he sees children waiting on the playground. The volunteers run physical drills and classroom lessons, blending disciplined, military-style management with diversified curricular activities aimed at filling gaps in rural education.
Since 2021 the “Jinling Vanguard”—a Nanjing-based network of retired university student soldiers—has organised summer teaching brigades to Xingguo county and other parts of southern Jiangxi. The teams convert short-term visits into longer-term support by pooling donated funds, shipping nearly 10,000 books, and building “cloud classrooms” that link scarce local schools to urban educators. Their approach packages patriotic education, political and national-defence content, and basic scholastic tutoring into a single volunteer model they describe as “soldier-teachers.”
The Jinling Vanguard is part of a larger municipal initiative by Nanjing’s veterans affairs bureau to institutionalise veteran volunteering. The city now counts 1,346 volunteer teams and 9,459 retired service members across educational, legal and community roles. In 2025 the programme logged 6,257 events and reported more than 230,000 beneficiaries, and several of its projects have been absorbed into national campaigns to “inherit red genes” and sustain revolutionary memory.
For recipients in poor, mountainous communities, the programme delivers tangible benefits: more adults in classrooms, extra books, and remote lessons that expand local pupils’ horizons. For the volunteers and their municipal sponsors, the effort serves multiple objectives: reintegrating veterans into civilian life, projecting state-supported patriotism into the countryside, and helping municipal authorities demonstrate social governance results. The volunteers’ mix of practical teaching and red-history programming makes the activity both educational and symbolic.
The model raises questions about the balance between addressing educational shortfalls and delivering politically inflected content in schools. Military-style discipline and civic-military themes may improve attendance and civic knowledge, but they also reflect central priorities about national identity and ideological continuity. The programme’s reliance on donations and urban university cohorts highlights persistent inequalities between China’s coastal education resources and the interior’s rural schools.
Viewed from Beijing and Nanjing, the Jinling Vanguard is a relatively low-cost, high-visibility solution to multiple policy challenges: veteran employment and social integration, rural service delivery, and patriotic education. For international observers, it offers a window into how the Chinese state and its local partners mobilise retired military personnel as a socialised reserve for public-service tasks, blending community development with political education. The durability and broader educational impact of such initiatives will depend on whether they can deliver sustained pedagogical gains without crowding out local teachers or narrowing curricula to ideological priorities.