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This is NEWS Plus Special English. I'm Mark Griffiths in Beijing. Here is the news.
The overhaul of the military has reached a point of no return as measures to shake up structure, revise attitudes and adjust interests have already been set in motion; that's according to an article responding to an announcement that the armed forces will be downsized.
By the end of 2017, China will have reduced its military personnel by 300,000. This will be the 11th time the military has been reduced in size since the founding of the People's Republic of China in 1949, and the fourth time since the 1980s.
The cuts are part of a wider package of measures to reform the People's Liberation Army, which will have around 2 million members after the reduction, compared with 6.3 million in 1949.
According to an article run in the PLA Daily newspaper, as China grows stronger, national defense and military strategies become more important.
President Xi Jinping, who is also chairman of the Central Military Commission, has, on many occasions, stressed that "a prosperous nation and a strong army" are the foundations upon which national rejuvenation will be built.
This is NEWS Plus Special English.
A handwritten confession by a Japanese soldier from World War Two describes troops setting fire to 100 homes in east China's Shandong Province in September 1941, burning some 50 Chinese civilians to death inside their homes.
The State Archives Administration of China published the confession by Bunpei Nozawa, who joined the Japanese invasion in 1940 and was captured in China in 1945.
Nozawa recalled that the civilians killed in the fires included the elderly and children. He burned down two homes with one old woman lying in bed inside one of the rooms. Nozawa also confessed to multiple cases of rape and murder between 1941 and 1945.
Nozawa's confession is the 27th in a series of 31 written statements by Japanese war criminals published on the State Archives Administration website in commemoration of the 70th anniversary of the end of WWII.
