Chinese Snipers train hard ...... and the grenade that fell nearby !!

We have seen that in many cinemas.  Handling a grenade is child’s play.  Take the grenade out, pull out the pin by hand or mouth – hold and throw it at the target ……. Elementary, it might appear.  A ‘sniper’ is a highly trained marksman who operates alone, in a pair, or with a sniper team to maintain close visual contact with the enemy and engage targets from concealed positions or distances exceeding the detection capabilities of enemy personnel.  Snipers typically have highly selective and specialized training and use high-precision/special application rifles and optics, and often have sophisticated communication assets to feed valuable combat information back to their units.

China is seen as a tough competitor in global market, often vying with India.  News is that,  China approved the formation of three new free-trade zones,  at  Tianjin, Guangdong and Fujian.  The new FTZs will all adopt the ‘negative list’ approach, which is  a much-misunderstood concept among the business community.  Under the ‘negative list’ system, foreign investors are prohibited from engaging in any businesses or industries contained on the negative list, but are otherwise free to operate within the FTZ.

Away,  the  question in American political economy is why middle-class wages have been falling. There are roughly three main hypotheses: robots, unions and China.  Robots theory suggest that  if automation is replacing big chunks of the human workforce, things are only going to get worse as robots become more capable and efficient.  Unions are favoured as usual by the Left.   The right generally represents business interests and capital owners – they have big moneyed business transactions with China, Left is afraid to go against the free-trade orthodoxy.  China is becoming mightier !!

MailOnline reports that the People's Liberation Army of China is taking the upcoming Military and Police Sniper World Cup seriously. A group of top snipers have been put under intense training for the past two months for a chance to compete in the competition. Among other tasks, soldiers have been asked to shoot the images of flies hidden among bees and grasshoppers on a target sheet from as far away as 100 metres, according to the People's Daily Online.

Snipers are giving all they can during training as only the top ones can represent China in Hungary for a chance to lift up the World Cup.  One of the coaches is quoted as saying that in order to improve the snipers' level of precision, the coaches have asked them to hit five flies on the target within a set time limit.  The target itself will have not only five flies but also five bees, five grasshoppers and you can only hit five flies to gain the highest scores,' added the coach.  Each year the trainers will think of new and unusual tests for the snipers; other tasks include hitting targets placed 100 metres away from a moving vehicle, which travels at 30 kilometres per hour. 

There is huge intensity in the training while a Chinese army commander saved hapless trainee from being blown to bits after a  grenade slipped out of the cadet’s hand.   In an unrelated incident, a hapless police rookie was lucky to survive after he accidentally dropped a live hand grenade by his feet after pulling the pin.  New recruit, Xiao Zhang, was training with the Guangzhou's Militarized Police Unit when he made the clanger as he went to throw the explosive, the People's Daily Online reports. The remarkable footage shows him drop the explosive behind him and was only saved by the quick-thinking of instructor Chen Qihui who pulled him into a nearby trench.

As part of their training, the military police recruits are expected to throw the grenade onto waste ground while taking cover behind a sandbag wall; but the man accidentally lets go of the weapon, hitting the barricade and falling nearer - as he goes to throw it.  The butterfingers caused the grenade land on the wrong side; it landed about metres away from where the recruit and his instructor were standing, on the wrong side of the safety wall.  The youngman admitted that he froze in shock and had to be dragged into a safety trench, that was more than a metre deep, where he was able to shelter from the explosion.  As the grenade exploded sending up a cloud of black smoke, both reappeared from the trench with barely a scratch,  thanks to the quick thinking of the commander.

The plastic training grenades are slightly lighter than the standard device grenades but still have a kill range of seven metres.

With regards – S. Sampathkumar

27^th Mar 2015.