On a cold night high on a snow-swept plateau, soldiers of a People’s Liberation Army company answer roll-call in unison when a name is called. The shouted “Here!” that follows the call of Pang Guoxing — a deputy squad leader who died in action in 1962 — is less ritual than a transmission: an audible link between a 20th-century border battle and the challenges of 21st-century warfare.
The company preserves Pang’s memory in handwritten unit histories and a tacit nickname, “Grandpa Pang,” that lets recruits imagine the hero as an elder who ages with them. That continuity of memory is intentional. Commanders describe the practice as a way to graft the ethos of sacrifice and daring onto new demands: not bayonet charges, but integrated, intelligence-led assault and sustainment under a joint command structure.
The unit’s recent history illustrates the frictions of that graft. After entering a combined-arms formation in 2017, the company failed a tactical evaluation: command-and-control problems, lagging information flow and poor weapon-system coordination led to training “casualties.” The setback forced a rethink from the top down: leaders sent personnel to learn on the spot with other companies, reworked small-unit organisation around intelligence nodes, and insisted on mental as well as technical transformation.
That cultural pivot is visible in the granular details of modernisation. Junior soldiers who once trained to close with the enemy now learn data links, unmanned aerial vehicle operations and digital flight plans. The company built equipment ‘‘health records’’ for every vehicle and weapon system and developed low-tech technical fixes — a fluorescent-line aiming method and a spirit-level correction for night shooting — that were later adopted across the brigade and beyond.
Personal narratives reinforce the organisational shift. A conscript once judged unfit for specialist work became the unit’s lead drone operator after nights studying flight theory and hours at the controls; another soldier broke a divisional hand‑grenade record through methodical repetition and video analysis. These vignettes illustrate a wider claim made by the company: modern combat demands both stubborn effort and creative problem-solving at the lowest levels.
Exercises now present the company as a distributed force. In a year-end competitive drill, symbols for the unit split into multiple small teams that, guided by UAV reconnaissance and supported by fires, threaded several routes through a defended area. What was once a three-man tactical cell — commander, scout, attacker — has been scaled conceptually into nodes within a larger, data-driven joint system.
The unit’s story is not only tactical but political. The deliberate use of Pang’s persona performs a dual function: it preserves martial virtues prized by the Chinese Communist Party while legitimising doctrinal change. The moral remains explicit in Pang’s own words: the individual’s sacrifice yields collective benefit. That formula helps political and military leaders reconcile the discomfort of reform with an appealing continuity of purpose.
For international observers, the episode offers a compact case study of how the PLA seeks to combine tradition with transformation. The unit demonstrates that technological upgrades — drones, digital command networks, new firing aids — are only part of the equation; training, institutional learning and a deliberately cultivated culture of resilience are equally central to producing combat-capable formations able to operate in high-altitude and contested environments.
Finally, the company’s experience underscores a broader operational lesson: capability development in the PLA is iterative and local. Failures in early integrated tests were met not with wholesale replacement but with learning loops, grassroots innovation and doctrinal adjustment. That method of incremental improvement could accelerate the practical readiness of other units facing similar missions along China’s frontiers.