Party Committee of a Battalion of the First Guard Regiment, PAP Chongqing General Corps Conducts No-Holds-Barred After-Action Review
Party Committee of a Battalion of the First Guard Regiment, PAP Chongqing General Corps Conducts No-Holds-Barred After-Action Review——
Falling Twice, Coming Away Wiser
■ Yao Cheng, Yao Maomao, PLA Daily Special Correspondent Zhang Yongqing
Battalion officers and soldiers studying and discussing training subjects. Photo by Guo Chuanwu
Not long ago, temperatures in Chongqing were climbing, but the atmosphere in the conference room of a certain battalion of the First Guard Regiment, PAP Chongqing General Corps had dropped to "freezing point." The battalion party committee was leading party member cadres in an after-action review, analyzing the reasons for failure in two important areas of work.
Some time earlier, the battalion had ranked near the bottom overall in a military skills competition organized by higher authorities, and a carefully organized signature cultural activity had also received a "poor rating" during a regiment-level inspection.
Falling twice in a row left the battalion party committee unable to sit still. For this after-action review, the regiment leadership assigned to provide guidance and assistance also attended the meeting as observers.
At the outset, the atmosphere was somewhat heavy, and no one dared to fire the "first shot" lightly. After a moment of silence, the deputy political instructor responsible for organizing the signature cultural activity spoke up: "For this outcome, I must conduct a profound self-examination. I did not keep close enough watch day-to-day, did not grasp things concretely enough, which led to the signature highlights not being distinctive enough…"
He had barely gotten two sentences into his prepared remarks when the attending regiment leadership interrupted him: "A review and analysis this painless and inconsequential is better left undone!"
The regiment leader then recounted an episode from the experience of a revolutionary predecessor. In the summer of 1938, the position of commander of the Eighth Route Army's 344th Brigade was vacant, and Tian Shouyao, a regimental commander with outstanding combat achievements, was not promoted to fill it and developed a resentful attitude.
Zhu De subjected Tian Shouyao to severe criticism at the brigade party committee meeting: "Whoever the play calls for, that person performs; if it hasn't called for you, you cannot take the stage. You are a Communist Party member! We all follow the Party Central Committee—you cannot throw a tantrum."
The frank, soul-touching criticism awakened Tian Shouyao. Thereafter he cast aside selfish thoughts, threw himself into the anti-Japanese battlefield, repeatedly distinguished himself in battle, and later died a heroic death, becoming an anti-Japanese hero whose name is recorded in history.
"Criticism and self-criticism is the best method of ideological remolding (思想改造). Whether that remolding is genuine depends entirely on whether the criticism is real and whether people are truly serious about it. Some of the prominent problems that have appeared in unit development are, at their root, problems of ideology and work style. To resolve them at the source, we must go at it with real swords and real spears (真刀实枪), getting down to specific people, specific events, and specific thinking." The regiment leadership told everyone: "Today's after-action review is not a session for reading from scripts, and still less is it a formality to go through. Everyone must dig into the problems, probe the lesions, say what there is to say, and focus the study on whatever problems are most serious."
These words caused everyone to set aside their reservations entirely. The battalion political instructor took the lead in reflecting: "I am the party committee secretary and bear primary responsibility. The main cause lies in problems with my coordination of work—rehearsals for the performance and remedial intensive training were all competing for time, venues, and resources. Why were they competing? Because both sides were striving to show results and wanted to produce achievements. This is departmentalism (本位主义) and utilitarianism (功利主义); at the root, there has been a deviation in the outlook on political achievements (政绩观)."
Seeing the political instructor proactively "exposing his own shortcomings," the battalion commander also acknowledged frankly: "In my day-to-day work I habitually focus on my own 'three-thirds of an acre' (一亩三分地). I regarded military training as a hard indicator and cultural development as a soft task—time could be dragged out as long as possible, venues could be occupied whenever possible. At a deeper level, I did not communicate enough with the political instructor; we each fought our own battle, which both affected overall development and imposed a great deal of unnecessary burden on the officers and soldiers."
The two principal leaders turned the blade inward and completely pierced that layer of paper over the window. Everyone also set down their prepared remarks, opened their hearts, and picked up the "scalpel" to cut deep into their thinking: some reflected on treating their area of responsibility as a private plot, attending only to the part and ignoring the whole; some identified their habit of using "busy with work" as an excuse, deploying tasks without rolling up their sleeves, accustomed to being an "absentee manager" (甩手掌柜); some analyzed their tendency to pick easy tasks and avoid hard ones, to detour around contradictions and problems, unwilling to criticize and unwilling to struggle.
A company political instructor was blunt in his specific analysis: "Cultural activities should educate, inspire, and guide people. Looking back at ours, during rehearsals we picked apart every single movement over and over again for a very long time, pursuing only form and surface spectacle one-sidedly, but we did not work hard enough at excavating the content and substance of the activity. The result was rain that only wets the surface—the officers and soldiers came away with no real impression or feeling." He noted that a sister unit had cleverly made quietly dedicated local exemplars the protagonists of their cultural activity, using nearby examples to educate nearby people, which more readily moved everyone.
"Pursuing spectacle is about getting leaders to take notice; lacking investigation means disregarding whether the officers and soldiers are satisfied. These problems are all classic cases of a distorted outlook on political achievements (政绩观错位)." The regiment leadership picked up the thread and continued the analysis: "We also need to carefully identify next how many more of these 'vanity projects' (面子工程) and 'bonsai designs' (盆景设计) remain, and resolutely rectify every one of them."
The topic turned to the failure in the skills competition, and the deputy battalion commander proactively reflected: "The fact that sister units surpassed us this time was not only because they showed significant improvement in difficult and key subjects—more importantly, their foundational training subjects were more solid than ours. In the past we had situations of cobbling together top performers to win scores; this time, with all personnel rotating through as participants, the shortfall in our weak foundation was completely exposed."
"A single branch in bloom does not mean the whole garden is full of spring; excelling in individual events does not mean the whole is strong." As everyone listened and discussed: "In our day-to-day training organization, we have not implemented specialized instructor assignment, pass-or-fail assessment mechanisms, and tiered training methods with enough force—some have even been left in neutral."
From incisive self-dissection, to straightforwardly identifying deep-level problems, to jointly analyzing and discussing in search of solutions, the atmosphere in the meeting room grew increasingly animated.
Interest groups could be established to encourage officers and soldiers to independently design cultural and recreational activities; it is necessary to strengthen cooperation with local red-heritage venues, and in connection with the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Red Army's Long March, to deeply excavate and apply red resources to educate and forge the soul (育人铸魂); establish digital training records for each officer and soldier, precisely analyze shortfalls, and dynamically provide remedial training; invite outstanding coaches from the General Corps and regiment to give demonstration instruction, and cultivate a core of coaches… The reporter observed everyone simultaneously discussing and writing down specific corrective measures on paper.
Ideological remolding (思想改造) has no completion, only an ongoing process. "Persisting in making good use of the weapon of criticism, and continuously sweeping the dust from one's thinking, is the only way to forge a strong and capable party committee leadership group." The regiment leadership told the reporter that by attending this meeting as an observer, he too had gained many new insights. In the course of continuously deepening political rectification training (政治整训), the regiment party committee must also explore integrating criticism and self-criticism into all areas of work, normalizing reflective analysis and critical reminders, and supervising party member cadres at all levels to continuously improve their work methods and transform their work style.
When the reporter revisited the battalion in recent days, certain scenes left a strong impression: the political instructor, wearing full gear, standing at the head of the formation and training alongside the soldiers; the battalion commander proactively stepping in to fill a gap, guiding a certain company in planning the upgrade of its psychological counseling room…
"Once the problems were laid out in the open, the heart actually felt more at ease," the political instructor said with feeling. That after-action review had made everyone's face burn, but because everyone had spoken frankly and openly, their hearts felt warm. Now, he and the battalion commander meet every day to study work and communicate, strengthening coordination on key tasks; the combined force driving combat readiness training and unit development has grown stronger.