Chinese here. Wow it's actually hilarious to read how some western people see the PLA exactly the way we see DPRK army.

I have no military experience, but with access to Chinese sources, I feel justified to point out some obvious errors:

> Not to be outdone by the conventional army, China’s powerful strategic rocket troops, the Second Artillery Force, still uses cavalry units to patrol its sprawling missile bases deep within China’s vast interior. Why? Because it doesn’t have any helicopters.

I believe all calvary troops, except a few symbolic ones, are canceled during the "Million Disarmament" in the middle 1980s. The linked gallery should be showing a group of guards of honor or simple soldiers in recreation. They are even equipped with swords; if it's fair to claim that the Second Artillery still use horses for patrolling, it's fair to say they use swords for combat too, which is absurd.

China produces helicopters, for civil or military uses. For instance, this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAIC_Z-10. They were used extensively during the 2008 Sichuan earthquakes.

> For that reason, the PLA has to engage in constant “political work” at the expense of training for combat. This means that 30 to 40 percent of an officer’s career (or roughly 15 hours per 40-hour work week) is wasted studying CCP propaganda, singing patriotic songs, and conducting small group discussions on Marxist-Leninist theory. And when PLA officers do train, it is almost always a cautious affair that rarely involves risky (i.e., realistic) training scenarios.

This is exaggerating too much. According to the PLA Political Work Regulation (http://www.ljxw.gov.cn/news_detail-3993.html), political work are recommended to be organized "weekly and lasting a half-day", and required to be "no less than twice per month". That is 10% or 5% of working hours. Well, some army officers may be over-enthusiastic about political work and organize such activities very frequently, but that definitely would make him unpopular...

> Yet none of this should be comforting to China’s potential military adversaries. It is precisely China’s military weakness that makes it so dangerous. Take the PLA’s lack of combat experience, for example. A few minor border scraps aside, the PLA hasn’t seen real combat since the Korean War.

Some have already mentioned the Sino-Indian war. There has also been Sino-Vietnamese war (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Vietnamese_War).

The world is relatively peaceful today, and the troops of most big nations have not fighted big wars for many decades. Except for USA which actively provokes wars.

> The Chinese military is dangerous in another way as well. Recognizing that it will never be able to compete with the U.S. and its allies using traditional methods of war fighting, the PLA has turned to unconventional “asymmetric” first-strike weapons and capabilities to make up for its lack of conventional firepower, professionalism and experience.

From a purely cultural POV, western and Chinese militarists may have vastly different ideas of "traditional methods of war fighting". Saying that the (supposed) enemy will not obeys the "traditional rules" sounds like an excuse of not actually trying to understand them.