Soon after a video of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) recruits seen ‘crying’ while being sent to the Sino-India border, a war of words has escalated between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese media.
The video was published by a local network in the eastern Chinese province of Anhui last week.
The video showed the young soldiers inside a bus and singing a well-known Chinese military song “Green Flowers in the Army” and almost all of them seemed emotional, with some ‘crying’.
Taiwanese media such as Liberty Times and Taiwan News, ‘mocked’ the soldiers for crying.
They interpreted it to be a sign of fear against deployment at the border with India amid the ongoing tension in eastern Ladakh.
It may be mentioned here that China considers Taiwan as a breakaway region to be reunified by force if necessary.
Presently, 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.
“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.
“In the video, the soldiers can be seen sobbing hysterically as they struggle to sing the words to the PLA song ‘Green Flowers in the Army,’” the report added.
Meanwhile, the Chinese media reacted strongly against the video and said that its Taiwanese counterparts deliberately misinterpreted the emotional video involving the PLA soldiers.
“At that time, they were bidding farewell to their parents and sang the famous military song ‘Green Flowers in the Army’, and they sang ‘Go home when you celebrate your work’, completely contrary to the mood created by Taiwanese media,” reported Global Times on Tuesday.
The Global Times report added that many who re-posted the content mocking the PLA were Twitter users from India.
