China-Taiwan media war over ‘Crying’ PLA troops on their way to India border

A bizarre war of words has broken out between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese media over a video of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) recruits being sent to the Sino-India border, with some of them appearing to be in tears. The video, published online last week by a local network in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui, showed the young soldiers inside a bus and singing a well-known Chinese military song “Green Flowers in the Army”. Nearly all of them seemed emotional, with some crying. Taiwanese media such as Liberty Times and Taiwan News, known for their pro-independence, anti-China stand, seemed to mock the soldiers for crying, interpreting it as a sign of fear against deployment at the border with India amid the ongoing tension in eastern Ladakh. China considers Taiwan as a breakaway region to be reunified by force if necessary and currently – much like with India – military tension between the two is rapidly escalating. The recruits in the video are from the Yingzhou district of Fuyang city in Anhui. The video was shared across online platforms in China as well as on Twitter and on Facebook, interestingly by a Pakistani comedian Zaid Hamid. “As tensions continue to simmer on the Sino-Indian border, a video surfaced on Sunday (September 20) showing PLA soldiers crying as they are allegedly deployed to the border,” the Taiwan News reported on Tuesday. The new troops were “reportedly college students, and five of them had ‘proactively volunteered to serve in Tibet’, which borders the Ladakh region where the bloody Galwan Valley skirmish took place in June of this year,” it said.