In the cold heart of Jiangxi’s southern hills, a series of photographic collages known as “smile walls” have become the most visible sign of a quieter campaign: the People’s Liberation Army’s sustained, hands‑on support for village revival in former revolutionary base areas. The images — elders with weathered faces, children absorbed in donated books, farmers beaming beside ripening citrus — are deliberately staged tokens of progress, but they also point to years of coordinated work by the Ganzhou military sub‑district to shore up livelihoods and local governance.
The military began pairing units with 19 villages in early 2021, moving beyond episodic aid to a multi‑pronged assistance program. Commanders and political officers worked with village committees to upgrade education facilities, unblock farm access roads, introduce technical agricultural support, organise harvests, and establish elderly care facilities. The stated aim is continuity: not merely to lift households over the poverty line but to keep them tethered to state support as rural development transitions from poverty alleviation to long‑term revitalization.
The human stories are specific. In Longgang village, descendants of Red Army families now live in three‑storey homes after taking up speciality crops and receiving logistical and training help from military units. In Huangsha village near Ganzhou city, a villager turned sceptic became a successful citrus grower after the local military arm coordinated road repairs, technical advice and harvest logistics. In Chengtou village, a “happiness home” for the elderly opened in late 2025; villagers describe it as a small, tangible reversal of long years of out‑migration and ageing in isolation.
Those anecdotes capture why the campaign matters to Beijing’s broader governance project. The central leadership has shifted its messaging from mass poverty alleviation to agricultural modernization and rural resilience, framing the countryside as integral to national stability and the “Chinese style” path to modernity. In that context the military’s involvement serves two functions: a practical one, filling capacity gaps in remote, historically significant counties; and a political one, symbolising the Party‑Army link and the state’s continued presence in former revolutionary strongholds.
The Gannan programme emphasises institutionalising support: five core measures to build mechanisms, fortify grassroots organisations, consolidate past gains, cultivate local economic niches, and sustain investment. These are not merely goodwill projects but a replication‑friendly model — infrastructure plus human capital plus branding — that local governments and military organs can export to other old revolutionary bases working to stabilise rural populations and reduce urban pull.
Yet the arrangement raises questions about sustainability and the proper boundary between military and civilian roles. Reliance on the armed forces to perform public‑goods functions can accelerate results where civilian capacity is thin, but it may also embed military actors in long‑term social management tasks that fall more naturally to local government, NGOs or market actors. How resources, responsibilities and accountability are rebalanced as villages graduate from poverty relief to autonomous development will be a key test.
For international observers, the imagery of smiling villagers is more than a feel‑good story: it illustrates how the Party and the PLA are co‑opting social welfare instruments to consolidate legitimacy in rural China. The work in Jiangxi is earnest and locally effective, but it also exemplifies a governance choice — to make the military a visible partner in socio‑economic transformation — that carries implications for civil‑military relations and the diffusion of state capacity across the countryside.