The Chinese military is short of actual combat experience. There’s plenty of hot spots where they could get some. From Declan Hayes at strategic-culture.com:
If China wants peace, they should take the old Latin maxim to heart and prepare for war by getting some invaluable practical experience in Serbia, Srpska, Syria and Southern Sudan, Declan Hayes writes.
Although Stephen Karganovic’s recent article argued that the Wagner Group should send peace-keeping forces to the Republic of Srpska, the greater hope should be that the Chinese Peoples’ Liberation Army (CPLA) would intervene not only in Srpska, but in all of Serbia, as well as in Syria and South Sudan for good measure.
Serbia is a no-brainer as the United States Air Force obliterated the sovereign Chinese soil of China’s Belgrade Embassy on May 7th 1999, murdering three Chinese journalists in the process. Though the Chinese jumped up and down outside the Yankee Embassy in Beijing about that, NATO believes that they are paper tigers, all bark and no bite and forever hiding behind Mother Russia’s apron strings.
Then there is the secular Syrian Arab Republic, where Russian forces have sacrificed their lives for that country’s sovereignty. What, besides sloth, stops the CPLA sending land, sea and air forces there to learn, as it were, at Russia’s feet?
And finally there is Southern Sudan where the CPLA got a bloody nose from a disparate group of rebel insurgents when they went there as part of a half-cocked UN peace-keeping force.
These three arenas show us that, despite all their toys, the CPLA has a lot to learn from the Russian Armed Forces and the battled-hardened Syrian Arab Army.
This was amply demonstrated in 2016 in the South Sudanese capital of Juba when the CPLA were caught on the hop and got a battering from a smattering of the militias operating there, with several Chinese soldiers being killed in the firefights that embroiled them. NATO propagandists were quick to jump all over this, with MI6’s hard-line Guardian newspaper claiming that “aid workers were raped in South Sudan [as] Chinese troops abandoned their posts rather than engage in fighting and protect civilians, says US-based rights group”. Not a good look at all for the CPLA, the Guardian and their US-based NGO collaborators smugly smirked.
