A hall lit by stage lights and hundreds of fixed gazes set the scene for a recent anniversary performance by an Eastern Theatre Command air force unit marking its 75th year. The unit gathered officers and aircrews for a commemorative evening of self-written dances, dramatic vignettes and musical numbers that rewound decades of operational claims — from a 1951 night-raid episode the unit highlights as pioneering People's Air Force night bombing, to Cold War-era safety awards and civil-defence missions such as bombing a Yellow River ice dam to avert flooding.
The performances were not mere nostalgia. The dramatised vignettes and choreography recreated moments of combat, peacetime rescue and parade-ground scrutiny to anchor a shared identity among personnel. Applause filled the room as stories of past sacrifices and honours were staged in sequence, offering a theatrical shorthand for values the unit wants to transmit: technical proficiency, bravery and political loyalty.
This “bring history onto the stage” approach is part of a systematic programme of unit-level political and professional education. On key dates such as Lunar New Year, the Party’s anniversary and Army Day, the unit mounts cultural evenings, storytelling sessions and seminars titled things like “What does war history tell us?” to fold institutional memory into routine training.
New personnel receive what the unit calls “soldier-from-day-one” instruction: guided tours of military history galleries and honour rooms, familiarisation with new-generation equipment, and a unit history reader listed as mandatory reading for recruits. A radio programme aimed at inculcating heroic exemplars and “transmitting heroic genes” completes the package of soft-skill and ideology-driven indoctrination for fresh arrivals.
Veterans are brought into the loop through a regular “go out, bring in” campaign of visits and talks. One elderly officer exhorted young pilots to love the Party and the people, to fly well and to be brave — a terse reminder that technical proficiency is expected to sit beside ideological fidelity. Young pilots cited in the unit’s publicity say they have taken those exhortations into the cockpit and into increasingly ambitious training cycles.
Those cycles have a concrete operational edge: the unit reports intensified long-range and expeditionary training in the Western Pacific, participation in China–Russia joint maritime patrols and other combined exercises, and cross-regional manoeuvres featuring H-6K bomber formations. The narrative the unit is promoting links historical continuity to modern capability, suggesting that the same collective spirit that “won” past battles is now powering extended-range, integrated operations.
For external observers the package matters for two reasons. Domestically, it illustrates how political education, ceremonial spectacle and professional training are being blended inside the People’s Liberation Army to sustain cohesion and morale during a period of technological change and higher operational tempo. Regionally, it signals a normalized habit of expeditionary training in the Eastern Theatre that maps onto heightened tensions across the Taiwan Strait and greater strategic competition in the Western Pacific.
These performances and programmes are therefore not incidental celebrations of unit lore. They function as a low-cost, high-frequency instrument of internal cohesion, recruitment and political socialisation that sits alongside hardware modernisation. If the past is being staged to motivate personnel, the present is being rehearsed to project a more confident, mobile air force across a wider maritime domain.