Chinese Military Comes to Terms with Past

While the leaders of China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) have always put considerable stress on the need to ensure that its troops be properly motivated, communicating with the outside world has never been of particular concern to them. But this has changed. China's Ministry of Defense has now set up a website in English with the obvious purpose of presenting to the international community a more comprehensive and positive image of its past.

Granted, this is not the first attempt by China's military to have an international communications presence; in March 2003, the PLA daily went online with an English-language edition. This, however, could be perceived as an endeavor by a newspaper and not by the Ministry of Defense as such. Then, in August 2009, the ministry followed suit with its own website and while there is a considerable communality regarding the information carried by the two websites the fact that one is published by the ministry in its