Chinese President Xi Jinping on Tuesday ordered the military to scale up the battle preparedness, visualising the worst-case scenarios and asked them to resolutely defend the country’s sovereignty.
Xi made the remarks while attending a plenary meeting of the delegation of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) and People's Armed Police Force during the current parliament session being held here.
Xi ordered the military to think about worst-case scenarios, scale up training and battle preparedness, promptly and effectively deal with all sorts of complex situations and resolutely safeguard national sovereignty, security and development interests, state-run Xinhua news agency reported, without mentioning any specific issues that posed a threat to the country.
His comments came in the backdrop of the continuing standoff between the militaries of India and China at the LAC. The US-China military frictions were also on the rise with the US navy stepping its patrols in the disputed South China Sea as well as the Taiwan Straits.
Washington and Beijing are also engaged in a war of words over the origin of the coronavirus pandemic.
In his meeting with a PLA delegation on Tuesday, he stressed on achieving the targets and missions of strengthening the national defence and armed forces for 2020, while maintaining effective epidemic control on a regular basis. He listened to speeches by the military deputies on fulfilling epidemic control tasks, strengthening training amid the epidemic, and accelerating capacity building on biosecurity defence, among others.
Xi has been stressing on the troops battle preparedness ever since he came to power in 2012 insisting on real time exercises to win wars.