Snow Leopard Commandos: China's Elite Paramilitary Strike Force

They are the special unit built to do everything, be everywhere, and turn the tide against any enemy foolish enough to incur their wrath. From the time their existence was announced to the world, China’s Snow Leopard Commandos have maintained a shadowy reputation, operating at the fringes and dark corners of Chinese society, seeing to it that allies and figureheads of the state have no reason to fear for their safety on Chinese soil. One part SWAT team, one part military special forces, and one part a collection of James Bond-style super-agents, the Snow Leopards are China’s best-known elite special-operations force — even despite the fact that very little is known about them.

Secret Origins: From Snow Wolves to Snow Leopards

The Snow Leopard Commando unit was established in secret at the end of 2002, known at that time as the Snow Wolf Commando Unit, in homage to the abilities of the unit’s mascot, the Arctic wolf, which not only survives but thrives in very harsh environments. At the time they were established, the then-Snow Wolves were an attempt to beef up China’s ability to maintain its own domestic security, at a moment when China was beginning to diversify its society and political leadership and merge into the democratic-centralist brand of Marxism that it espouses today. They were also established, directly or indirectly, with the intent of serving during an event that would prove very important: the Beijing Summer Olympics of 2008, which had been awarded to China a little over a year prior to the Snow Wolves being established.

Despite the fact that they are special-operations-style commandos, the Snow Leopards are not a military unit but instead an elite unit within the People’s Armed Police, which in China is a paramilitary organization responsible for riot control, counter-terrorism, and disaster response. The People’s Armed Police are different from the civilian-led People’s Police, who are a nationalized equivalent of local law enforcement found anywhere in the world. The People’s Armed Police report instead to the Chinese military, making them not so much an equivalent to the FBI in America or France’s General Directorate for Internal Security, but more like a proper military force cleared to operate on its own soil — akin to the Soviet Bloc’s internal troops of the Cold War.

This distinction is especially important when considering the Snow Leopards, still named the Snow Wolves at that time, as they were unveiled to the world in 2006. They had spent the past several years recruiting and training in secret, meaning that when their existence was publicly acknowledged by Beijing, they were already in fighting shape and ready to begin their work. Chinese leaders explained that the Snow Wolves were meant to be China’s premier anti-terrorism unit, and they were also expected to assume roles protecting high-level diplomats during the Olympics, including both China’s own leaders and foreign delegates.

Securing the 2008 Beijing Olympics

The Snow Wolves quickly got to work proving their mettle in training demonstrations, which were carried out in front of an audience of foreign diplomats in order to build confidence in their abilities. Two big events took place for the Snow Wolves in 2008. First, they changed their name, officially becoming the Snow Leopard Commando Unit in homage to China’s native big cat.

And second, they fulfilled their promised role in protecting the 2008 Olympics in Beijing. It is hard to overstate just how important these Olympics were to the Chinese Communist Party when they took place. In many ways, they were treated as an opportunity to introduce modern China to the world as a sleek, cosmopolitan, rich nation that had no intention of comporting with Westerners who thought of it as a third-world country.

But in an Olympics that were about winning and dining the rest of the world, China absolutely could not afford to allow hostile actors to take advantage of the situation. Beijing was kept on its highest alert level during the entire event and made no secret of its fears that separatist groups from China’s Xinjiang province would attempt a terror attack. Over the course of the entire event, not a single terror attack or act of organized violence took place.

A joint China and UN report, published in 2010, claimed that Chinese security forces had had their hands full, with multiple attempted biological and chemical weapons attacks as well as bomb threats. While it is impossible to say exactly which unit responded to what, this is precisely the threat the Snow Leopard Commandos were tasked with defeating. With the resounding success of the 2008 Olympics behind them, the Snow Leopard Commandos switched into their day-to-day role at the forefront of China’s internal security.

Within China, they began to spread westward toward Xinjiang, where they have since kept a steady presence. They have also become one of the few Chinese police units expected to operate internationally, with Snow Leopards deployed to Afghanistan on bodyguard duty for Chinese diplomats. They have been mainstays at China’s many economic forums, trade expos, sporting competitions, and diplomatic summits, and they have been deployed to lock down areas in China in advance of expected times of unrest, maintaining a heavy, visible, but generally silent presence in order to menace any potential attacker into backing down.

Structure, Equipment, and Operational Versatility

Not much is known about the way the Snow Leopard Commandos structure their units, but according to Chinese media, they organize into four basic squadrons. The Ninth and Tenth Squadrons are responsible for counter-terrorism operations, while the Eleventh Squadron is concerned with bomb disposal and preventing the use of weapons of mass destruction. The Twelfth Squadron is an elite sniper unit.

The Snow Leopards are somewhat similar to other elite police tactical units around the world, and much like those other units, they show up heavily armed and ready for anything. The group uses imported American vehicles and equipment as a centerpiece in many of their operations, and they carry heavy body armor, advanced communications equipment, and a wide range of firearms. Little record exists on what they carry into engagements that are not public-facing, and given their status as a true paramilitary unit, it stands to reason that they have significantly heavier weapons in their arsenal.

The wide range of operations the Snow Leopards are expected to be prepared for is notable. They are intended for use in crowd control, anti-riot policing, and even urban warfare in combat zones, and their roles in China’s cities are by far their most publicized appearances. They are also trained to go into battle in a wide range of adverse environments, from the high, cold Himalayas to China’s southern jungles to the Gobi Desert in the north.

They are trained both in counterterrorism and in counterinsurgency, capable of filling the roles of police on the streets or reconnaissance operatives on the frontier. They are trained as bodyguards, air-assault troops, raiders, trackers, and maritime boarding parties — a Swiss Army knife of special operations. With high operational versatility come very real trade-offs.

The strength of the Snow Leopard Commandos is unknown, but some estimates place their numbers as low as just a few hundred, while even the more liberal analysts do not expect the commandos to have more than one to two thousand operatives, even more than two decades after the unit was first formed. Such a long list of responsibilities and operational expectations may well get in the way of their ability to serve any of those roles on par with other elite special-operator forces. There are only so many hours in a week, and such a wide range of things to train for may mean that the Snow Leopards spend only a limited time gaining competencies in certain areas.

But it is equally likely that the group may be far more stratified than their basic structure suggests, with dedicated small units of no more than a couple of dozen super-elite operators carrying out advanced training in each of the Snow Leopards’ many areas of responsibility.

Recruitment, Training, and Devil Week

The Snow Leopard Commandos recruit exclusively from officers of the regular units of the People’s Armed Police, after those officers have gained at least one to two years’ prior experience doing riot control, guard duty, security, emergency response, and all the other more basic jobs of the PAP. Because of the uncommonly young age of recruits to the People’s Armed Police, most of whom begin their training at age 18, the Snow Leopard Commandos are similarly youthful in their recruitment pool; the average age of a Snow Leopard trainee is about 22 years old. Upon application, Snow Leopard hopefuls are put through a battery of interviews and testing and then made to complete a challenging pre-selection test.

With no time limits, recruits are expected to complete 100 push-ups, 100 squats, 100 barbell lifts — believed to be deadlifts — and 200 sit-ups, before going out on a ten-kilometer ruck while carrying a pack of 35 kilograms. Once they pass, they are placed into a grueling training process where they are physically conditioned, trained on a wide range of weapons, and taught to conduct tactical operations. Their days start by running a 5K and end by running another 5K; in the intervening time, they practice live-fire drills, learn hand-to-hand combat, and are trained in advanced driving and climbing, all while learning to cope with and push through the minor injuries they sustain.

Over fifty percent of recruits never even make it past the pre-screening process, and those who do are likely to wash out from training at high attrition rates. Much like other famous special-operations groups around the world, Snow Leopard training features a Hell Week — or, in their case, a Devil Week — during which time young Snow Leopards are forced to push themselves to the limit while consuming very little food and sleeping only for an hour or two in a twenty-four-hour period. During the week, recruits ruck their 40-kilogram packs for some 260 kilometers, practice high-stress attack simulations, show that they can escape ambushes and firefights, and withstand a series of intense psychological challenges and examinations.

Chinese media also spotlights what it refers to as the Fire Barrier, an obstacle course that is meant to be achievable in theory but psychologically terrifying to an exhausted, starving recruit. Jumping through fire and crawling under flames, the recruits must demonstrate their ability to keep composure and act courageously, trusting in their abilities while overriding their basic survival instinct. In many ways, these descriptions of Snow Leopard training expose the youth of Chinese special operations in general.

These training regimens could be assembled from even a cursory reading of the collected works of those most prolific authors over at the US Navy SEALs, even despite a few twists, turns, and bits of added flair to make it their own. But the other side to that equation is that China appears to be investing itself into the same tried-and-true methods that are known to produce competent special operators, rather than reinventing the wheel just to say that they did.

China’s Special Operations Landscape and the Snow Leopards’ Place Within It

It is equally important to view the Snow Leopards’ capabilities in context to Chinese special operations in general — which, as far as is known, are a relatively new endeavor for the Chinese military. China’s first special-operations unit, the Special Reconnaissance Group, was only established in 1988, and since then the country’s spec-ops landscape has become a patchwork arrangement: large, brigade-size detachments of general-action units assigned around the world, similar to the United States’ Army Rangers, and a long list of small, dedicated units that pitch in whenever their specific expertise is in demand. Uniquely, the Snow Leopards seem to operate in something of an intermediary space; they are not particularly specialized, and they are not particularly big.

Whether that means they simply fill a different role in the Chinese special-operations sphere, or they operate as elite attachés or shock troops to enhance the capabilities of those other detachments, remains unclear. The Snow Leopard Commandos have impressed other special operators around the world in training exercises, most prominently in Jordan’s Annual Warrior Competition, which is the special-operations version of the Olympic Games, featuring events like marksmanship and small-unit tactics. The event is a regular showcase for the world’s elite of the elite, as well as a way for participating countries to measure themselves against each other.

In 2013 and 2014, the Snow Leopards sent a team to compete, and in both years they took home the gold, beating out another Chinese special operations unit and Jordan’s Royal Guard in the runner-up spots in 2014. The events also featured Russian ex-KGB operators, Swiss Skorpion troops, and the Lebanese Black Panthers, as well as a number of American teams recruited from a patchwork of elite units. The Snow Leopards swept several of the events, and in the following years, no other Chinese team has been able to replicate those feats for multiple overall victories.

For that matter, neither has any other team, except for Lebanon’s Black Panthers.

Xinjiang Operations and the Uighur Crackdown

It is either fortunate or unfortunate that the Snow Leopards are largely untested in conventional combat — or, at least, in the combat that international observers would ever be made aware of. Not only are the Snow Leopards a young organization, but they, like the rest of China’s military, have not gone on many interventionist expeditions around the world and have engaged mostly in military and diplomatic posturing, rather than war, with their neighbors. That is not to say the Snow Leopards have not seen any action.

The unit has been on the leading edge of China’s efforts to suppress what it believes to be dissent and revolt in the western province of Xinjiang. Roughly eleven million Uighur Muslims live under Chinese rule in Xinjiang, over a million of whom have been imprisoned since 2017, while the rest have been subjected to surveillance, forced sterilization, and restrictions on their religion. To hear China tell it, this is an effort to homogenize a region that has a history of violent outbursts against a benevolent Chinese state; to hear the UN and many foreign governments tell it, it constitutes a genocide against China’s Uighur Muslim population, with the express goal of eliminating them from Chinese society.

In 2019, China unveiled a new, dedicated counterterrorism unit to deal with uprisings in Xinjiang, known as the Mountain Eagle commando unit, but prior to 2019, the Snow Leopard Commandos played a central role in suppressing the Uighur population. During those earlier years, Snow Leopards kept constant watch on Xinjiang’s cities, relying on lesser security forces for identity checks and searches in the streets, but rapidly responding to any perceived issues or threats as they arose. During the years the Snow Leopards were active in Xinjiang, the area saw its first labor and re-education camps rise up out of the ground, filled with Uighurs who someone had to round up and bring into captivity.

Though it is not known how central the Snow Leopards were to that effort, it is fair to assume that they, the most advanced and capable force in the region, were responsible for rooting out what China perceived to be its most dangerous enemies. From 2015 to 2019, China claimed that there had been no successful terror attacks in Xinjiang, a track record for which the Snow Leopards likely deserve credit.

Hong Kong, Guangzhou, and a Potential Role in a Taiwan Invasion

Since the arrival of the Mountain Eagles in Xinjiang, the Snow Leopards have relocated to the city of Guangzhou in central China, putting them in direct proximity to potential flashpoints in Hong Kong, Macau, and Taiwan. It is unclear just how big a role the Snow Leopards played during the Hong Kong protests of 2019 and 2020, but the broader People’s Armed Police organization featured heavily in the efforts to suppress those protests, with some 4,000 personnel believed to be present in the city during the unrest. According to China’s own state media and interviews with People’s Armed Police leaders, the Snow Leopards would have been directly responsible for spearheading counter-protest action in that area of China, suggesting that they maintained at least some direct presence on the ground.

As for when the Snow Leopard Commandos might be tested in combat, some Western analysts speculate that given their tactical skills and the location of their home base, they would be a key part of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Snow Leopards would be prime candidates to infiltrate the island in advance of a full-scale invasion, laying low and sowing chaos via sabotage or attacks in the Taiwanese rear once a Chinese fleet approaches the shore. Once an invasion of the island is underway, the Snow Leopards’ capabilities in reconnaissance and raids would make them valuable forward operators, while their ability to put down riots and insurgencies could be instrumental in controlling the Taiwanese population and stamping out any pockets of resistance that survive.

Perhaps most important, they would be the first choice of the Chinese military to suppress any revolts at home and stamp out any groups that might want to sabotage the Chinese war effort with attacks on the home front. All this being said, the Snow Leopards have been conspicuously absent from China’s high-profile naval exercises in the South China Sea, but the unit’s potential to wreak havoc during an invasion cannot be ignored. The Snow Leopard Commandos still have yet to test their mettle in any real, large-scale combat environment.

But the ruthless efficiency of counter-terror operations in China, where this high-octane counterterrorism squad has taken a central role, indicates that the Snow Leopards are a truly elite unit, capable of dealing with a wide array of operational challenges. Like any other untested military unit, it is impossible to say whether the Snow Leopards might be the best special operators in the world, or whether they are in fact a paper tiger, poised to fall apart in their first appearance in the global big leagues. But the world is sure to learn what the Snow Leopard Commandos are capable of, one way or the other.

Sources

1. https://www.diplomacy.edu/resource/the-role-of-the-beijing-olympics-in-chinas-public-diplomacy-and-its-impact-on-politics-economics-and-environment/
2. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-olympics-terror/beijing-olympics-beat-terror-threats-unsafe-sex-report-idUSTRE64I3UA20100519
3. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-35174326
4. https://warontherocks.com/2015/01/chinese-special-operations-forces-not-like-back-at-bragg/
5. https://www.businessinsider.com/how-china-special-forces-compare-to-us-special-operators-2020-12
6. https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/chinas-version-seal-team-6/
7. https://msigwarrior.com/pft-cn-snow-leopard.html
8. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/china-xinjiang-uyghurs-muslims-repression-genocide-human-rights
9. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/chinese-commandos-in-campaign-against-xinjiang-s-islamist-rebels-2339635.html
10. https://asiatimes.com/2019/08/china-unveils-special-counter-terror-force-in-xinjiang/
11. https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/china-now-has-commandos-on-horseback-to-tackle-terror-in-xinjiang/story-GB1uduXmiTzojY17BfTKRJ.html
12. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-hongkong-protests-military-exclusive/exclusive-chinas-internal-security-force-on-frontlines-of-hong-kong-protests-idUSKBN2150JZ
13. https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/08/06/chinas-paramilitary-police-could-crush-hong-kong/
14. https://www.voanews.com/a/china-sends-anti-terrorism-force-to-xinjiang-region-127651433/167866.html
15. http://jczs.news.sina.com.cn/p/2006-09-13/1559397837.html
16. https://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/magazine/sleep-away-camp-for-postmodern-cowboys.html
17. https://digital-commons.usnwc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1017&context=cmsi-maritime-reports
18. https://inss.ndu.edu/Portals/82/China%20SP%2014%20Final%20for%20Web.pdf