The Taiwanese media mocked the video, saying Chinese soldiers were crying due to fear of deployment on the India-China border

An online video published last week, showing the young soldiers of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA) singing and getting emotional, led to a bizarre war of words between mainland Chinese and Taiwanese media.

The video showed the young soldiers inside a bus singing a well-known Chinese military song “Green Flowers in the Army”. Nearly all of them seemed emotional, with some crying, said a report in Hindustan Times.

Taiwanese media mocked the soldiers for crying and interpreted it as a sign of fear against deployment at the border with India amid the ongoing border tension, according to the report.

Taiwanese media outlet Taiwan News reported on Tuesday, “As tensions continue to simmer on the Sino-Indian border, a video surfaced on Sunday (September 20) showing PLA soldiers crying as they are allegedly deployed to the border.”

The troops were “reportedly college students, and five of them had ‘proactively volunteered to serve in Tibet’, which borders the Ladakh region where the bloody Galwan Valley skirmish took place in June of this year,” the Taiwan News report said.

“In the video, the soldiers can be seen sobbing hysterically as they struggle to sing the words to the PLA song ‘Green Flowers in the Army,” it added.

The video was also put up on Twitter and Facebook by Pakistani comedian Zaid Hamid. The report said that Hamid seemed to be “poking fun” at the recruits despite him saying: “We Pakistani support you China. Stay Brave.”

In response, Chinese state-controlled media Global Times said that Taiwanese media deliberately misinterpreted the emotional video involving the PLA soldiers.

“At that time, they were bidding farewell to their parents and sang the famous military song ‘Green Flowers in the Army’, and they sang ‘Go home when you celebrate your work’, completely contrary to the mood created by Taiwanese media,” the report said.

It further said that though the Taiwanese media report “tried to use all kinds of explicit hints to shape the image of the PLA fighters being ‘afraid of war’, when describing all the key information, the author used vague terms such as ‘reported’ and ‘probable’, which seemed very guilty.”