Movies and marriage

Finding wives for the more than 100,000 unmarried People's Liberation Army soldiers who formed the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps in 1954 was one of the most urgent and difficult tasks facing the central government at the time.

In the early days, most of the regiments consisted solely of male soldiers, and they were based in the harsh environments of the Gobi Desert and Xinjiang's border regions. The soldiers' chances of meeting a woman were almost zero, according to Lu Zhenou, who arrived in the Xinjiang Uygur autonomous region as a fresh-faced 20-year-old PLA soldier from the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region in South China.

To solve the problem, large numbers of female soldiers were recruited from Shandong province in the East and Central China's Hunan province, several years after the corp was founded, the 85-year-old recalled.