plawolf
Lieutenant General
It's vanity camo. The PLA issues unique patterns to special "Elite" Units. 2nd Art wears mostly the woodland pattern, 38th Group Army was pctured in 09 sporting a unique woodland dubbed Type 07 Hunter Digital Camo, PLAAF sports a Urban pattern, on 60th national the 15th Airborne wore a digital Sky blue, green, greyish green and light greyish blue set unique to themselves, PAP has it's own camo pattern with Arid and a Tiger stripe variant to once again single out elites from the grunts.
The PLA is not going to allow vanity to jeopardise operational effectiveness.
Some elites and special forces many get special issue camo patterns as a perk, but those are still camo patterns designed to work as camouflage first and foremost.
The US Navy and Marines also quite frequently uses blue camo combat uniforms, especially when serving about warships.
The choice of standard issue camo pattern actually betrays the roles and conditions the respective forces are primarily intended to serve, as well as their main expected combat theatre.
For the US marines, their mission is primarily one of expeditionary force. They are intended to face severely weakened enemy coastal defences, or to make unopposed landings.
Basically, getting ashore is assumed as almost a given, for the US marines and not where they expect the hardest fight to be.
OTOH, PLA marines are intended primarily to take Taiwan, and would face some of the most well defended beaches ever fought over.
In such a fight, their only mission would be to land, to take and secure a beachhead long enough for the PLA to deploy regular army troops and heavy armour.
As soon as PLA regulars and heavy armour get ashore in numbers, that's pretty much game set and match. The marines can put their feet up and enjoy the gratitude of a nation for a job well done.
And to be brutally honest, in most scenarios, even today, because of the extremely tight timeframe the PLA would be fighting under to try and not even give America the option of getting directly involved, they will not be able to spend anywhere close to as long as they would like softening up all the defences before they have to send the marines in.
Under such conditions, and against the defences arrayed against them, I do not think the PLA high command would expect enough marines to survive the taking and holding of the beachhead on Taiwan to be worth deploying them to the fight further inland.