People's Liberation Army

The People's Liberation Army is the military arm through which the Chinese state attempts to control the outbreak, protect strategic assets, and preserve political authority. Its decisive significance lies in the contradiction it represents: China possesses enough force to wage open warfare across major cities, but that force is repeatedly used to conceal failure, enforce obedience, and defend an untenable system rather than to prevent the disaster at its source.

Nature and State Authority

The People's Liberation Army appears as an organization subordinate to the state’s political and security apparatus, operating alongside the Ministry of State Security and the so-called Ministry of Health. Its power is not limited to battlefield combat. It can seal locations, seize patients, conduct examinations, draw blood, photograph civilians, and incarcerate people without formal charges. In the New Dachang incident, the military-security response follows the discovery of seven barely conscious patients in a locked communal meeting hall: the patients are removed in shackles and gags, a dead boy is carried out in a body bag, and the villagers are rounded up for examination. The operation converts a medical emergency into a security cordon, treating frightened civilians and possible victims as objects of surveillance and control.

This authority is presented as both bureaucratically organized and politically opaque. Kwang Jingshu is arrested by the Ministry of State Security and held without formal charges; by the time he escapes, the outbreak has crossed China’s borders. The detention demonstrates how the state handles inconvenient knowledge: rather than publicly investigating the warning, it removes the person who possesses it. The result is not containment but delay, and the delay allows a local crisis to become an international one.

Suppression, Containment, and the Outbreak

The army’s role in the early outbreak is inseparable from the suppression of warnings. Kwang Jingshu’s colleague Gu Wen Kuei recognizes the danger and attempts to alert him before the authorities arrive. His warning recalls the phrase he used during the 1969 border clashes with the Soviet Union, when the two doctors worked in an earthen bunker under artillery fire. The memory gives the phrase a precise political meaning: Gu Wen Kuei has learned to speak indirectly when direct disclosure is dangerous, and Kwang Jingshu understands that the emergency is not isolated.

The later account of organ trafficking broadens the organization’s responsibility beyond the first rural intervention. In the early stages, no one fully understands the infection, while elements of the Chinese army are described as continuing a lucrative trade in organs taken from executed political prisoners. Infected organs, corneas, pituitary glands, kidneys, blood, eggs, and sperm may therefore enter international circulation. The People's Liberation Army is not depicted as the sole mechanism of transmission, but its association with state violence and the organ market exposes how military and political power can amplify a biological threat through institutionalized exploitation.

The organization also becomes central to the official explanation of the Three Gorges Dam collapse. The disaster releases roughly ten trillion gallons of water carrying debris, vehicles, houses, trees, and enormous fragments of the dam toward the East China Sea. The Chinese leadership calls it an unforeseen tragedy and an unavoidable accident, despite the dam’s construction on an active fault line, earlier earthquakes induced by reservoir weight, detected foundation cracks, abandoned seismic warning stations, and neglected emergency spillway controls. The account further challenges the later claim that soldiers of the People's Liberation Army died defending the structure: the witness who observed the site for more than a year saw no such living defenders. The army’s public image is thus used to support a revised official story after the physical catastrophe has already exposed governmental negligence.

Coercion, Punishment, and Moral Responsibility

The People's Liberation Army also appears as an institution that makes civilians and soldiers participate in violence. In one remembered military punishment, soldiers are divided into groups of ten and ordered to vote on which member will be executed. They must then kill their own friends with hand-sized stones pushed toward them on creaking carts. The procedure is designed to produce more than fear. By making each soldier an accomplice, it binds the group through guilt and transfers responsibility from the command structure to the victims and executors alike.

The same logic shapes the soldiers’ later understanding of freedom. They could refuse and be shot, but they comply; afterward, they can claim that someone else told them to do it. The organization’s discipline therefore operates through a deliberate fusion of command, collective participation, and moral self-exculpation. Its violence is not merely spontaneous brutality. It is a system for making obedience feel unavoidable while ensuring that everyone involved has a reason to preserve the system that compromised them.

War Capacity and Strategic Limits

The People's Liberation Army possesses formidable force, but the war reveals that conventional military power is poorly suited to the living dead. The scale of the enemy is estimated at two hundred million zombies. Even with accumulated knowledge of their origin, physiology, strengths, weaknesses, motives, and mentality, the prospect of victory remains bleak because the assumptions supporting ordinary armies no longer apply. Conventional forces must be bred, fed, and led; the living dead require none of these conditions. They do not need recruitment, supply lines, or a command hierarchy, and the army must construct a new theory of war from the ground up.

The broader military response eventually favors logistics and economical killing over spectacular weapons. The People's Liberation Army is part of the conflict that makes the resource-to-kill ratio a governing principle: every weapon must be judged by what it consumes against how many zombies it can destroy. This doctrine stands against expensive technological fantasies such as Project Yellow Jacket, whose designers promise to deploy millions of satellite-guided micro-missiles against zombie brains across North America within forty-eight hours. The contrast is between an imagined war-winning device and the patient material requirements of sustained combat.

The book’s military testimony emphasizes the importance of reliable infantry equipment. The Standard Infantry Rifle is valued because it is accurate, resistant to mud, sand, and saltwater, and adaptable through interchangeable parts and barrels for sniper, rifle, and carbine roles. Its NATO 5.56 Cherry PIE ammunition shatters inside a zombie skull and burns the brain without spreading infected tissue, eliminating the need for wasteful bonfires and, in some burial duties, even decapitation. These details show how the war is ultimately shaped less by symbolic might than by durable tools, ammunition efficiency, and the ability to maintain operations under extreme conditions.

Consequences and Historical Significance

The People's Liberation Army cannot prevent the outbreak from becoming global, and its coercive responses help produce the political rupture that follows. The arrest of Kwang Jingshu suppresses a warning; the handling of patients and villagers turns medical care into terror; the organ trade creates possible international vectors; and the defense of the Three Gorges Dam becomes part of a discredited official narrative. Military power remains visible everywhere, but visibility is not the same as control.

Its legacy is therefore double. The army represents the state’s capacity to mobilize troops, impose emergency measures, and claim responsibility for national survival. At the same time, it demonstrates how an institution built for command can become an instrument of denial when political preservation outranks truthful reporting and public protection. The organization’s most consequential failure is not simply that it loses territory or cannot defeat the dead. It is that its authority is repeatedly spent on secrecy, punishment, and retrospective justification until the population no longer accepts the state’s account of what happened.