The children wake up to the national anthem of China at 6:30 a.m. They are between nine and 13 years old and sleep in cabins with seven bunk beds in the middle of a forest north of Beijing. There is no room for yawning. In less than three minutes, they must be dressed in military uniform, boots on, and arms straight as boards. After a solemn salute to the red flag, they go to the canteen to have oatmeal and a hard-boiled egg bathed in soy and honey for breakfast. The next scene closely resembles one that appears in the animated version of Mulan: the platoon gathers in a courtyard and trains with a bo, a long wooden staff used in classic Chinese martial arts exercises, such as kung fu and wushu.
When the heat starts to rise, the children venture into the forest for a hiking route. They carry backpacks filled with sand and stones. After the hike, they rest in the shade, sitting with crossed legs on bamboo mats, while copying brief Confucian reflections on respect, obedience, and honor in notebooks. "Here, there is no weakness or retreat, only persistence and victory," shouts one of the monitors, a former paratrooper from the People's Liberation Army of China.
At 12:00 p.m., they return to the canteen for lunch. They are served trays with small portions of rice, beef, tofu, and vegetables. After a short break in the cabins, it's time for war games. The children are divided into small groups. Some embark on rescue missions with maps and compasses. Others, equipped with unloaded rifles and camouflage clothing, simulate a raid on the enemy camp. And some train in detecting anti-personnel mines.
The next class involves assembling and disassembling short-range weapons, which they also test at a shooting range with blank bullets. Then, inside an auditorium in the main building of the camp, the children study how to decipher "anti-Japanese war codes". A teacher projects several slides with secret codes that the Japanese used during the invasion of China in the context of the Second World War.
In the late afternoon, just before dinner, some groups also participate in a simulated kidnapping. The children, who have previously received a quick instruction on how to free themselves if tied up, are locked in sheds filled with mud. There, their eyes are blindfolded, and they are tied with zip ties. The children must free themselves in less than 10 minutes using wires and sharp stones hidden in the room.
For dinner, vegetables, fruits, and jiaozi (steamed Chinese dumplings) filled with pork are abundant. Before the end of the day, there is one last training session. The children are divided into several groups. While some practice a nighttime assault on an enemy camp to rescue their captain, the rest must venture into the forest on a rescue mission to find a companion who has become trapped in a trench.
This is the routine on an intense day in July at the Youth Military Training Camp, open every summer in Beijing since 2008. "We have provided immersive military training to more than 250,000 young people, helping them shape their character," the presentation states. Throughout this month, the monitors welcome several groups of children who spend seven days training at the facilities. The price is 4,280 yuan, which is around 500 euros.
"Summer military camps for children are becoming increasingly popular in China," explains Ms. Li, who manages an agency where many of these camps are advertised. Local experts who have studied this growing phenomenon point out that families seek to have children forge a tough character and be mentally prepared for the extreme academic and work competition they will face in the future. "Until after the Beijing Olympics (2008), the summer camp industry was almost non-existent, and wealthy families sent their children abroad. As a strong class emerged, many academic camps began to open, followed by military and extreme activity camps," Li explains.
The parents of Shulin, an 11-year-old boy from Beijing, have sent the child to two of these "extreme camps" this summer, one to train the body and the other the mind. In the second one, a five-day "comprehensive brain training program is offered with various cognitive games for children aged 0 to 14," promising that the child will be able to read 6,000 words or memorize a classic Chinese poem in just one minute. "Our program works by stimulating both the left and right hemispheres of the brain simultaneously," they point out. One of the most common training methods involves memorization with flashcards, puzzles, word-building exercises, and using the abacus, the traditional wooden box with parallel bars through which movable balls run to perform arithmetic exercises.
Before training the mind, Shulin spent nine days at the West Point Military Summer Camp, also in Beijing. "We cultivate ideology, national defense, morality, physical training, and teamwork. We help campers correct bad behaviors. All our instructors are excellent veterans with over five years of military service, highly trained to teach and do good ideological work with children," explain from this center that promotes training in shooting ranges and survival in the field.
In the surroundings of Shanghai, this type of camp has also been quite successful in recent years. "In addition to improving children's physical condition, we teach them problem-solving skills," says one of the workers who collects registrations for the Jiaolong Assault Special Forces Summer Military Camp. "We also provide first aid and self-defense courses," he continues.
"I understand that some parents want their children, especially if they are very rebellious, to spend a few firm days under military discipline, even to learn to defend themselves. But, in my opinion, some of these camp activities are too extreme for such young children, besides, I don't see the need for them to learn to use a weapon or combat tactics at that age," says Jiang, a primary school teacher who recalls that she was also forced to wear a military uniform but, in her case, shortly before turning eighteen, just before entering university.
"I spent 21 consecutive days getting up at 4:30 in the morning for military training. Endurance races, triathlons, climbing, and MMA-style hand-to-hand combat... I lost almost 10 kilos in three weeks. They also gave us many talks telling us that our country needed us because there were more and more enemies knocking on our door," the teacher recounts.
None of the children's military camps consulted in Beijing or Shanghai have allowed a journalist to visit their facilities. Last year, on Chinese social media, there was a lot of controversy after a video went viral showing a monitor at one of these camps holding an 11-year-old boy underwater for a long time with his hands tied behind his back. Faced with the uproar, the camp director spoke to local media to explain that the boy was "shy" and that the water training aimed to help him "overcome psychological barriers".
The Chinese press has often reported incidents involving minors who suffer serious injuries or even die. In 2021, a 16-year-old teenager died while on a week-long hike in the Tengger Desert in the northern region of Inner Mongolia. The autopsy confirmed that the cause of death was heatstroke, and the camp monitors were brought to trial for manslaughter due to negligence. In 2023, a young influencer died while at a camp in southern China dedicated to extreme exercise for weight loss. She, Cuihua, 21, weighed 156 kilos when she died of sudden death after a gym session.