When a military train pulled into a station in Bengbu, Anhui, nearly a hundred soldiers stepped off and were handed steaming meals before they had time to collect their kit. The food had been prepared, moved and staged by a newly formed volunteer team nicknamed the "small cart" service, drawing an approving thumbs-up from a passing unit commander who said the meals were waiting even before his troops arrived.
The service is the product of a short but deliberate recruitment drive by the Bengbu military supply station, which put out a call for retired servicemen and received 51 volunteers in a week. After vetting, ten became core members of the small cart team, tasked with organizing, transporting and delivering food for passing and temporarily stationed units.
The initiative responds to a structural challenge inside China’s logistics system: supply work is increasingly required around the clock and over long distances, yet traditional manpower arrangements struggle to keep pace with more frequent, large-scale troop movements. Far from ad hoc charity, the station has institutionalized the volunteers, issuing appointment letters, team flags and uniforms, providing skills training and integrating them into tasking procedures so that there is advance notice, on-site assignment and contingency handling.
Individual stories underline the practical value of the effort. One volunteer, a former field cook, has used his service experience to design regionally varied "warm bento" meals that suit troops drawn from across China; others have become known for punctual delivery or kitchen leadership. The station documents every mission in a service manual; since late December the small cart team has supported field training rations, supplied more than 200 meals for a passing detachment and repeatedly stepped in during sustained maneuvers.
Beyond the immediate utility, the project illustrates a broader trend in China toward leveraging retired military personnel and local government resources to plug capability gaps in defence support and emergency response. Municipal actors are increasingly experimenting with volunteer reserves and formalised civic roles that complement standing logistics formations, a model that both extends surge capacity and signals an emphasis on resilience at the grassroots.
That model is not without questions. Reliance on volunteers raises issues of consistency, liability, and scalability: can small, locally run teams be trusted to meet the standards required for sustained, complex supply operations? How the arrangement will be governed if demand grows — whether it becomes a formal reserve corps, a contracted adjunct or remains a civic gesture — will determine whether it strengthens or simply masks underlying shortages.
Still, the Bengbu example is telling. It shows how local initiative, retired personnel and modest institutional support can produce a low-cost, flexible response to evolving logistical demands, and how municipal-level ingenuity is being marshalled to support wider defence and emergency preparedness objectives.