By Xinhua
Beijing : When Li Shuiqing joined the Red Army at 13 years of age in 1930, his company had just about 100 soldiers and had to share a handful of rifles and dozens of spears and broadswords. A Little Red Devil – a tag given to all teenage recruits – he was too young to hold any weapon.
Li, 90, is now working on a book of his experiences during the war years from his hospital bed, dictating his memories to his secretary.
“From a Little Red Devil to an infantry division commander and then to the chief of China’s strategic missile troops, I’m proud to have witnessed and experienced the changes of China’s armed forces,” Li said.
When it all began, military life was harsh.
“Stop grumbling. As long as we follow the Red Army, the whole of China will be ours,” the company commander of 1930 told Li, in a futile bid to shake pessimism out of the teenager.
The communist party-led army was only three-years-old at that time. Li was typical of its soldiers – mostly uneducated peasants or labourers who had no logistics or weapon supplies.
Over the next three years, Li and his fellow soldiers followed the Red Army in fighting against the troops led by the Kuomintang, then the ruling party of China. The Red Army managed to withstand four largescale offensives by the Kuomintang troops, expanding rapidly to a force of more than 100,000 soldiers.
But in 1934, the Kuomintang launched a fifth round of attacks and captured the Red Army’s revolutionary base, which triggered the beginning of the communist two-year “strategic retreat”, now universally known as the Long March.
“The 12,500-km trek was full of hardships, bloodshed and do-or-die battles,” said Li, who was then a company political instructor in charge of educating his troops about the communist ideology.
When Li and his soldiers were crossing the wetlands in north Sichuan province in August 1935, food was scarce to the extreme. Li gave each soldier five broad beans over the first two days. On the third day, they frantically sliced up one cowhide belt and boiled it to eat.
“Hunger, disease and swamps killed thousands of my comrades, including my first company commander,” Li said. Of the 86,000 men and women who joined the Long March, just over 7,000 survived. Li was one of them.
Under pressure to defend China against Japanese invasion, the Kuomintang was forced to collaborate with the communists. The communist military forces were integrated into the National Revolutionary Army led by the Kuomintang.
Li said that “millet and rifles” were the basic equipment of the military forces. The two military groups used primarily guerrilla tactics but also managed to fight a number of conventional battles with the Japanese.
Following the victory over Japan in 1945, the Kuomintang-communist collaboration collapsed and the two armies were once again embroiled in a civil war.
The victory of the communist army, which had by then changed its name to the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), over the Kuomintang troops led to the founding of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949.
Shortly after the founding of the new China, Li and his troops, under the name of the People’s Volunteer Army, crossed the Yalu River to join the Korean War as international forces led by the US neared the Chinese border.
With virtually no air defence, the Chinese troops suffered hugely from air attacks led by the US forces. Thousands of soldiers were killed and the army’s logistic supply was seriously damaged.
The 1950-1953 Korean War, which ended in a ceasefire, served as a catalyst for the rapid modernization of the PLA.
Mao Zedong, the late Chinese leader and one of the founders of PLA, set to work on strengthening its navy and air force, which were set up in late 1949, using technological and financial aid from the Soviet Union.
In 1956, China unveiled its first jet fighter and developed its own atom bomb in the late 1950s and a hydrogen bomb in the late 1960s.
In 1966, the PLA set up its strategic missile troops. In 1977, Li, now a major general, was appointed the commander of the missile troops.
Achievements of the army’s reform and modernization were displayed at the grand military parade marking the 50th founding anniversary of China on Oct 1, 1999.
Li, along with other retired generals, watched the parade from the Tian’anmen Gate Tower. It was the first time that China’s homemade strategic missiles were displayed to the public.
“Nearly 95 percent of the weapons displayed in 1949 were seized from enemies. They were made by the US, Britain and Japan. But 95 percent of the weapons displayed in 1999 were produced by China,” said Li.
Experts say China’s modernization of its national defence has been based on very limited resources. Despite the 17.8-percent rise in military spending in 2007, China’s defence budget of 350.9 billion yuan ($46.2 billion) is only 10 percent of the military spending of $448 billion by the US.
In keeping with the modernization process, the number of PLA personnel has declined from a peak figure of 6.27 million in 1951, during the Korean War, to 2.3 million in 2005.