The 7.9-magnitude earthquake which struck on Monday, devastating a wide area of southwestern China, has given rise to familiar scenes: Chinese people at nature's mercy and the PLA marching to the rescue.

The PLA has not fought a significant military engagement since bloody border clashes in Vietnam in the late 1970s.

But armed with sandbags, shovels and stretchers, it has stayed active -- and squarely in the admiring Chinese public's eye -- as China's de facto response force in major disasters.

Tens of thousands of soldiers have been mobilised as China tries to reach rugged yet heavily populated areas where thousands of people are believed dead or buried under rubble after the quake collapsed countless buildings.

Few institutions in China have the ability to have mount such a mission besides the PLA -- with its roughly 2.3 million servicemen and women -- which has largely accounted for its frequent use over the years in disaster relief.

The government said last year that over the preceding two years alone, the PLA had dispatched 340,000 soldiers on 2,800 relief missions in the disaster-prone country, evacuating 3.4 million people out of harm's way.

Not included in that total would have been more than one million soldiers and PLA paramilitary troops deployed to help the country dig out from freak snow and ice storms earlier this year.

That disaster paralysed the nation's transport system just as hundreds of millions of Chinese jammed roads, trains and planes to head home for annual holidays, leaving millions stranded.

During the crisis, an embarrassed government used its state-controlled media to focus heavily on the PLA's can-do spirit, repeatedly broadcasting footage of soldiers aggressively attacking snow and ice-covered roads with shovels.

In one of the PLA's largest disaster mobilisations ever, the troops were praised as heroes in 1998 for intervening amid devastating floods on the Yangtze River, China's longest waterway and a recurring source of misery for untold millions of people.

Thousands died in the floods but the PLA was lauded for saving many more by evacuating tens of thousands of people, a fact frequently repeated even today by the government.

The PLA was virtually synonymous with the Communist Party under late leader Mao Zedong, who famously declared that "political power extends from the barrel of a gun."

Following Mao's death in 1976, the PLA was steadily repositioned as an apolitical professional force at the service of China's people, an image enhanced, experts have said, by its disaster missions.

Recently, China has further remade the former rag-tag peasant army as a modern force with a more robust outward projection, experts say.

It has poured billions into hi-tech equipment and launched an effort to trim its ranks into a leaner force capable of defending the country's interests in the 21st century.

But China's history of battling natural disasters looks likely to keep the PLA on the frontlines of that war.

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