Inside China's military melting pot

Editor's Note: Whampoa, China's first modern military academy, founded 90 years ago, was a beacon of liberation and the training ground of many of China's best-known revolutionaries during the following three decades. World War I, in which 140,000 Chinese served on the European Western Front, began 100 years ago, and next year will be the 70th anniversary of the end of World War II, the most devastating global conflict in history, marked by the Holocaust and prefigured in China by the start of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression in 1937 and the Nanjing Massacre that followed. In this series, China Daily honors those whose sacrifices in the wars of the last century helped to ensure the peace and prosperity enjoyed by the vast majority of humankind today.

Whampoa was China's first modern military academy, but many of the staff came from other countries and played a huge part in the school's success, as Zhao Xu reports.

When he was 14 years old, Chen Hanfeng discovered that everything he had been told about his father was untrue. "It was hot summer day in 1958. My mother came to my school, hugged me, and said, 'Your father is dead. He's been dead for two years'.