ARTICLE: “Quake Revealed Deficiencies of China’s Military: Chinese troops were eager, but they were unprepared to save lives,” by Jake Hooker, New York Times, 2 July 2008, p. A6.

James Mulvenon, an expert on the PLA for DC beltway bandit:

You basically had a bunch of guys humping through the mountains on foot and digging out people with their hands. It was not a stellar example of a modern military.

Exercises and think tank papers are nice to cite, but better to look at actual, unplanned operations to see what a military is capable of.

China’s air force took 44 hours to drop some bodies in one stricken region, and this from a military whose whole philosophy is still to dump bodies into war zones.

The upside? All the mil-mil cooperation that the PLA sought with national military establishments like ours and Japan’s.