A mechanized infantry company of the People’s Liberation Army — known as the “Red Third Company” of a brigade in the 78th Group Army — has been singled out in state media after a recent live-fire exercise in which it played the simulated “blue” force against a numerically superior and better-equipped “red” adversary. Under Company Commander Li Shuo the unit is portrayed as using a self-described “Three-Strong” ethos — steadfast, steel-like and invincible — to mount a mobile, attritional campaign that reportedly destroyed more than ten enemy tanks and infantry fighting vehicles while extracting itself intact.
The company’s tactics combined rapid IFV manoeuvrability with dispersed small-unit harassment and concentrated fire at decisive moments, an approach the report calls a “hunt” or “play-and-run” tactic. In exercise vignettes, leaders and NCOs personally scouted hidden routes and directed breaching teams through mines, wire and trenches; those actions are presented as evidence of high tactical proficiency and a resilient combat culture rather than solely technical superiority.
The piece anchors the company’s contemporary feats in a long political and military lineage that stretches back to the 1930s in Henan’s Guangshan region. The narrative weaves together civil-war and anti-Japanese-era heroics, later wartime exploits, and a string of institutional awards to portray the unit as an institutional carrier of “red genes” and battlefield courage, whose ethos is renewed by successive generations of officers and conscripts.
Several human-scale vignettes are used to illustrate how that ethos is cultivated: cold-weather, record-breaking preparation by a driver named Liao Zhiming; a gruelling personal transformation by squad leader Li Shunxin that produced two distance-running titles and a revised unit record; and a small team’s desperate breaching of obstacles in a muddy northern training area that opened a narrow path to success. Those stories are framed to show a chain linking arduous daily training to battlefield improvisation and resilience.
The company’s reputation also rests on civic deeds and moral exemplars. State coverage recalls a 1968 rescue in which then-acting platoon leader Wu Shaoqian dove into a collapsed well to save a child and later received high local and military honours. Contemporary acts of volunteerism — blood donations, accident rescues and community service at nursing homes — are portrayed as continuations of the same political loyalty and “serve-the-people” instinct.
For outside readers the account functions on two levels: as a straightforward description of small-unit tactics and morale-building, and as a piece of institutional narrative that links combat readiness with political reliability. The tactical descriptions are consistent with the PLA’s stated emphasis on combined-arms manoeuvre, decentralised command and rapid exploitation of mobility; the political framing underscores the party’s expectation that historical memory and civic activism reinforce unit cohesion.
That dual message is consequential. Domestically it helps sustain recruitment, morale and party-control narratives by personalising sacrifice and competence; externally it signals a PLA that seeks to demonstrate credible, professionalized small-unit operations without abandoning revolutionary legitimacy. Observers should read such vignettes as intentional: they aim to normalize a synthesis of modern doctrine and political education as the PLA’s preferred route to deterrence and preparedness, even as questions remain about how representative these accounts are of broader force-wide capabilities.