Chinese Military Raffling Himalayan Rock from Crushing 2020 Battle Loss to India
China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) on Friday advertised an upcoming raffle via social media in which it plans to give away a stone taken from the Galwan Valley in northern India’s Ladakh state to “10 lucky netizens,” China’s state-run Global Times reported.
The PLA’s Western Theater Command announced the raffle on January 7 through a notice posted by its official Sina Weibo account. Sina Weibo is a Chinese microblogging platform often likened to Twitter. The blog post detailed the command’s plans to “randomly choose 10 lucky netizens from those who reposted the notice and send them a stone from the Galwan Valley as a present,” according to the Global Times.
The advertisement was accompanied by a photograph of Chinese PLA soldiers “patrolling the Galwan Valley” along a rockface in the western Himalayas. The command superimposed Chinese characters onto the image reading, “Splendid landscape, no inch to give up.”
The Global Times quoted some Sina Weibo posts allegedly made by anonymous Chinese “netizens,” or social media users, in reaction to the PLA raffle. One such reaction “praised” the giveaway, describing it as “a very meaningful present as such a stone showed Chinese people’s attitude of not giving up one inch of the country’s territory.”
