China Has 2.5 Million ServicemenChina now has 2.5 million active service personnel in the People's Liberation Army (PLA), according to a report on the results of the latest national census.According to the report released Monday by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the size of the Chinese army is nearly 700, 000 less than it was ten years ago. A national census in 1990 showed that the PLA had 3,199,100 people in active service. China first slashed the size of its army by one million people in the 1980s. It reduced the number of service personnel by another 500,000 during the 1997-2000 period. |
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