I don't know where would be the right place to post this, but it's too off topic/speculative for the Ukraine war thread.
An interesting video on how Russia keeps growing it's army while making the war popular.
What I was thinking is that should, or is it even possible for China to emulate the same system? China also has a booming overall economy to pay essentially unlimited money, and fairly populated inner regions that are not as rich compared to the rest of the country.
Basically the drawback of this system is that things can become disorganised and "crowdfunded", but perhaps that is no drawback at all when thinking about infantry whose job is simply to occupy enemy territory and sometimes participate in assaults. Compared to the Russians, the vast majority of China's fighting will be from the air. It seems less viable to give pilots bonuses on the basis of just blowing things up. Or maybe it's also fine?
If US makes a move on Taiwan, China should strive to keep the war popular, and going full Ukraine with forced mobilisation is at least a sure way not to. But while China can rely on home territory boost in Taiwan, the war does not stop there and will encompass all of Asia, in many places China has never invaded or feel ties to in recent history.
China needs a way to create the "people's war" under modern conditions. The Russians might have the right idea with their decentralised, crowd funded and self-replicating (bounty money are reinvested in better kit, so soldiers can hunt even more bounties) model.
Unlike Russia, China's core troops will be very professional (in the sense that they don't post photos of themselves or care about bounties), since these are essentially patriotic career soldiers. But China can also create a huge 2nd echelon of mobiks who are not held to the same standards, these mobiks would only be unleashed in specially designated low intensity combat zones roughly on par with GWOT operations, and in addition to normal salary, they would be paid in bounties.
Unlike with Russia's system, many of China's mobiks do not need to risk themselves at all, as they can be drone operators sitting in safe territory. They would fly cheap(er) crowd funded drone designs and focus on pacifying the enemy's ground forces.
In this way, China would solve the problem of war popularity, of the military losing knowhow retention, and also how to keep occupations going at low cost.
