[Gothmog]

Thanks for your families service, but while the Chinese conscripts may have been brave in the face of death, they were certainly not volunteers and faced execution regardless. From "Mao the Untold Story", excerpts from pgs. 361-62, in response to the US response to N Korea's invasion of the South in 1950:

"Stalin signalled to Mao that the moment had come for him to act."

"Mao leapt into action."

"Poverty-stricken, exhausted China was about to be thrown into war with the USA."

"Mao was convinced that America could not defeat him, because of his one fundamental asset -- millions of expendable Chinese, including quite few that he was pretty keen to get rid of. In fact, the war provided a perfect chance to consign former Nationalist troops to their deaths. ... In case UN troops should fail to do the job, there were special execution squads in the rear to take care of anyone hanging back."

[Rembrandt_fan]

Execution squads in the rear are a staple of communist armies--the Soviet NKVD performed the same function during WWII. For that matter, we have MPs who round up battlefield deserters; all armies do. Unlike the commies, though, we don't shoot men out of hand--or rather, not any more. During the American Civil War, Union soldiers leaving the battlefield singly or in small groups had to 'show blood' to prove they were wounded; otherwise, they were often imprisoned and branded, perhaps executed depending on the exigencies of the situation. The Confederacy did the same--in fact, Braxton Bragg was notorious for the harshness with which he meted out capital and corporal punishment to his own men. All I'm saying is that the article's claim that many of the Chinese fighting in the Korean War were volunteers is probably true. Granted, their motivation to volunteer was probably the result of mass indoctrination, something at which Chinese leadership has always been adept.