Having been beaten black and blue continuously by the Indian Army since June, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which is a personal militia of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), has ramped up its propaganda operations, since evidently, these are the only ones which they can carry out successfully. As per latest reports, China is looking to distract attention of the international community from Ladakh and the extremely hot Line of Actual Control (LAC) with India, to the South China Sea and Taiwan, while also activating its military theatre commands which face the Korean Peninsula and Japan.
To showcase itself as a formidable military force, the PLA is now taking to outright plagiarism, with no shame whatsoever. As per an SCMP report, the PLA’s publicity team, which seems to have a disproportionate obsession with Hollywood films, has released a propaganda film showing the PLA Air Force bombing an American military base in the Pacific. Several of the scenes in the new video produced for the PLA Air Force – showing a simulated bombing exercise on an American military base in the Pacific region – look like they were lifted directly from the 2008 Oscar-winning The Hurt Locker and the 1996 action-thriller The Rock.
In the film released on Saturday, H-6K long-range bombers are shown flying from bases in western China to the Pacific, where they drop their payloads on a naval base that has a striking resemblance to the US facility on the island of Guam. Military sources told SCMP that it was not new for the Chinese military to ‘borrow’ scenes from Hollywood films for propaganda purposes in China, revealing also, “Almost all of the officers in the department grew up watching Hollywood movies, so in their minds, American war films have the coolest images.”
The plagiarised propaganda film on the part of the Chinese was necessitated due to the utter lack of face which they are being made to suffer by India in Eastern Ladakh, especially along the tense Pangong Tso Lake, where, over the past three weeks, the Indian Army has carried out pre-emptive and swift operations to secure dominating heights, directly overlooking the PLA troops and their camps, thus pushing them into an extremely disadvantageous position. To add to China’s woes, India has also recently secured six new dominating heights, including the Magar hill, Gurung Hill, Recehen La, Rezang La, Mokhpari and the dominating height over Chinese positions near Finger 4.
In an attempt to coverup for their repeated losses in Eastern Ladakh, the PLA is now stepping aggression in the South China Sea and against Taiwan. According to a report in Nikkei Asian Review, PLA has mobilised its Southern Theatre Command, which oversees the South China Sea, Northern Theatre Command, which overseas Korean Peninsula, and Eastern Theatre Command, which oversees Japan and Taiwan. The Western Theatre Command, of course, is currently occupied in dealing with India. The report also revealed that the mobilisation of four other military theatre commands was a distraction from the real stand-off in Himalayas.
Where an actual military confrontation is occurring, i.e., in the Himalayas, the PLA is blasting Punjabi music and shying away from real combat, while in regions where there is relative peace, the CCP-owned militia is flexing its non-existent muscles. This says volumes about how China is looking to open new fronts, in order to signal to the international community, particularly US and India, that it is capable of taking on both the giants simultaneously. How far this proposition is from the truth is demonstrated best by the PLA’s non-combative and psychological manoeuvres in Eastern Ladakh.