Zheng Hao, a company-level instructor with the People's Armed Police in Nanchang and a newly elected deputy to China’s National People’s Congress, has turned ritualised visits to revolutionary sites into a structured pedagogy aimed at making red history palpable to recruits raised online. Leading new conscripts through the Nanchang August 1st Memorial and the Jinggangshan martyrs’ cemetery, he has codified what he calls a “five-one” induction: the first class, the first meal, the first song, the first gift and the first external outing are all framed around revolutionary memory. The exercises are deliberately sensory and sequential — red rice and pumpkin soup, a first reading of Jinggangshan struggle stories, and the repetition of Red Army songs — designed to anchor abstract Party narratives in daily habit.
The method has real purchase. A young recruit known as Xiao Li, initially dispirited by the gap between peacetime training and pre-enlistment expectations, reportedly recommitted after a contemplative visit to a martyrs’ memorial and left a note swearing to be a “new-era Red Army heir.” Zheng’s approach leans on local heritage and ritual to cultivate affective loyalty rather than rely solely on classroom instruction. That strategy helps bridge generational divides, translating century-old Party mythology into an embodied practice for soldiers who grew up in an internet environment saturated with competing influences.
Zheng has parlayed his local experiments into policy proposals since becoming an NPC deputy. He has called for a centralised “red tradition database,” closer civil–military cooperation to exploit provincial memorials as classroom resources, compiled readers of martyr stories for wider distribution, and the digitisation of memorial venues to enable “cloud” sharing of red materials. These recommendations reflect two overlapping priorities in Beijing: institutionalising revolutionary memory as a component of military culture, and extending that culture into cyberspace so it reaches audiences beyond those who can physically visit heritage sites.
The push to formalise and digitise red education sits at the intersection of China’s broader statecraft: nationalism, social cohesion and military morale. Since Xi Jinping’s rise, the People’s Liberation Army and auxiliary forces such as the People’s Armed Police have undergone ideological tightening alongside technological and organisational modernisation. Embedding red narratives into routine training helps the leadership ensure that professionalisation is accompanied by political loyalty, smoothing the path for doctrinal changes and operational reforms that hinge on a unified chain of command.
Digitisation in particular carries strategic implications. Online archives, virtual tours and standardised educational materials allow authorities to scale patriotic instruction efficiently across a vast, internet-literate population. They also enable more central oversight of the content and narratives presented, reducing regional variation and informal interpretations. At the same time, the cloudification of memorials makes red education more portable and resilient against physical constraints, but raises questions about how curated, state-sanctioned history will compete with alternative narratives in the social media ecosystem.
For foreign observers, Zheng’s story is a small but telling instance of how the Chinese state seeks to weld historical memory to contemporary military and civic life. It illustrates a tactical blend of grassroots ritual and top-down institutionalisation: local commanders experiment with practices that are then translated into proposals for national promotion. The result is a feedback loop in which charismatic cadres can influence policy while the state amplifies successful techniques to foster homogeneity in political culture across the armed forces.
Zheng frames his work in simple, symbolic terms: red is the People’s Army’s spiritual bottom colour, and transmitting that gene is a relay race across generations. Whether presented as cultural preservation, morale-building or ideological consolidation, these efforts will shape the affective relationship between the Chinese state and the cohorts it recruits. The immediate effect is greater cohesion within units; the broader consequence is a military whose professional capacity is matched by deep political integration with the Party’s historical narrative.