The 2026 military Spring Festival Gala staged by China’s military broadcaster returned this week with a familiar theme: a ceremonial prelude that, the producers say, sets the nation’s military DNA stirring. Broadcast from Beijing and promoted across the People’s Liberation Army’s media channels, the gala blended music, dance and theatrical vignettes to revisit narratives of sacrifice, unity and duty that have become staples of PLA cultural work.
Framed as both entertainment and education, the gala explicitly tied popular performance to institutional memory, invoking veterans, border units and training scenes as emblems of a continuous martial tradition. The production emphasized continuity over novelty — reminding viewers that the values cultivated in barracks and on exercises are the same elements that, in the official telling, underpin national resilience.
The timing and format matter: the Spring Festival remains China’s largest seasonal moment of shared attention, and a military gala staged at New Year reaches families and potential recruits at a moment of heightened cultural receptivity. For the PLA and the Chinese Communist Party, such spectacles serve dual domestic purposes — bolstering troop morale inside the forces and shaping public perceptions of the military as modern, disciplined and loyal to the Party.
Beyond domestic audiences, these cultural displays are part of a longer campaign to professionalize the armed forces’ image and to normalize visible civil–military integration in everyday life. The gala’s polished production values and use of popular cultural forms reflect an effort to make military narratives feel less separate from, and more embedded in, mainstream Chinese culture.
That strategy is not unique to China, but it has specific implications in the current Chinese political environment. As the leadership sustains a high degree of political centralization and emphasizes readiness, cultural instruments such as the gala help transmit the Party’s priorities into unit life without resorting to purely doctrinal instruments. The result is a softer, more emotionally resonant channel of political socialization inside and beyond the barracks.
For international observers, the show offers a window into how the Chinese state manages identity and legitimacy at home. The military’s New Year programming is not a military exercise or an operational signal, but it does reveal how the PLA uses culture to consolidate internal cohesion and public support at a time when the government is attentive to both domestic stability and external competition.