On the afternoon of February 6, President Xi Jinping attended a Central Military Commission New Year cultural performance for retired senior cadres of the Beijing garrison at the China Theatre, delivering holiday greetings and public reassurance to veterans across the armed forces. The event unfolded against a festive Lunar New Year backdrop in Beijing, with Xi personally moving through the audience, exchanging pleasantries and inquiring after attendees’ health and living conditions.
The programme stitched together revolutionary songs, instrumental pieces and short dramatic vignettes that celebrated historical episodes such as the Long March, lauded border troops and showcased contemporary training and readiness. Numbers like “Forever Glory” and “Under the Party’s Banner Forward” framed a continuous narrative from the Red Army to today’s People’s Liberation Army, emphasising loyalty to the party, obedience to command and the transmission of “red” political traditions from one generation to the next.
Speeches and stage introductions highlighted core political formulations: adherence to Xi Jinping Thought, deep implementation of Xi’s “strong military” doctrines, the decisive significance of the “two establishments” and the necessity of the “two safeguards.” The show explicitly connected cultural performance with operational themes—practice, preparedness and modernization—underscoring the party’s insistence that political fidelity and combat readiness are mutually reinforcing.
The timing and audience matter. The gala targeted retired senior officers and other long-serving cadres who are custodians of the PLA’s institutional memory and moral authority. Welcoming them at a high-profile CMC event serves both to reward loyalty and to renew ideological bonds ahead of sensitive moments on the political calendar, including the approaching centenary milestones that the leadership has tied to its broader modernization aims.
Domestically, the spectacle reinforces a familiar playbook: use of ceremonial theatre and ritualised deference to consolidate personal authority and institutional cohesion. Public displays of mutual regard between the party’s supreme leader and military elders reduce the salience of any intra-institutional friction and signal a unified chain of command centred on the Chairman of the Central Military Commission.
For foreign audiences, the gala is a reminder that China continues to prioritise military modernisation and political control in tandem. While the evening’s songs and dances are ceremonial, their messaging—about training, readiness and ideological alignment—feeds into predictable policy choices: steady investment in the PLA’s capabilities, a disciplined command structure, and a domestic narrative that merges martial professionalism with loyalty to the party.
Viewed together, the performance is less an artistic event than a ritual of political maintenance. It reaffirms the dual tracks of the Xi era’s military strategy: hardening the armed forces’ combat effectiveness while continually tightening party oversight. Such ceremonies help explain how Beijing manages internal cohesion even as it pursues an outward posture of increased military competence.