The PLA’s Burden of Finished Tasks
| AUTHOR | Anushka Saxena |
| DATE | July 20, 2026 |
| CATEGORIES | China Defence Geostrategy |
Writing in the July 20th edition of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Daily, Zhang Xichen, a long-time military commentator brought back an experiment from the 1920s. Run by Bluma Zeigarnik, a Lithuanian-Soviet psychologist, the experiment concluded that the human brain is more capable of remembering unfinished tasks (the recall reaching at around 68%), than finished tasks (with a 43% recall rate).
Extending the argument to the PLA’s warfighting capabilities, Zhang interestingly argued that the moment troops complete their drills, or win an award at a military competition, they tend to approach the other end as a milestone passed rather than a hurdle jumped over in the trajectory of combat preparedness. How the Zeigarnik effect applies, is that the troops risk their memories being dominated by completed tasks, which, as Zhang conceives, is a “major military taboo.” As he explains:
One must understand that war is full of contingency and uncertainty; the enemy will not wait until you are ready before launching a war. Once one feels that one has “finished training” or “trained enough,” and puts the horses out to pasture and stores away the weapons, danger quietly draws near.
While the piece itself does not deal in doctrine-transformation – it speaks of the same profound changes unseen in a century and the fact that the “enemy will not wait” until the PLA is ready before launching a war – it does use provocative exhortations on war being treated as right around the corner. Zhang adds:
Hostile forces are always trying to trip us up, set traps for us, and find fault with us.
In that regard, the piece takes the “fixation” attached to unresolved problems, and argues for it to be “weaponised” for review, self-examination, “reconstruction,” and iteration. This maps cleanly onto the “hard and rigorous” training mandate, as well as the rhetoric around high intensity, intelligentized warfare.
Such commentaries, featured usually in the political work sections of the PLA Daily (‘Military Forum’ and ‘Ideological Front’, for example), suggest that the underlying complacency problem in the PLA is chronic. The CPC hence keeps commissioning the sermon in the hopes of keeping the sense of concern and crisis alive. Unfortunately for Beijing, as the examples of the US and Russia have shown in recent times, neither the peacetime inventory, nor battlefield experience, are any proof of combat victory in future wars.