Bing (rank)
military rank
Bing (Chinese: 兵; Korean: 병; Hanja: 兵) is the rank usually held by enlisted personnel in some East Asian militaries. The ranks are used in both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China on Taiwan, and both North and South Korea. The rank name is based on one of the four ancient occupations.
Etymology
The Sino-Korean word component "byeong" means "soldier" literally, used in a wide variety of words related with soldiers, like in busangbyeong (Korean: 부상병; Hanja: 負傷兵; lit. 'a wounded soldier'), but rarely (usually in technical context in armed forces) per se.
Byeongjangs who work closely with their US military counterparts are frequently addressed as "sergeant" or the equivalent E-5 term in English by the U.S. military. This varies however by unit. In a similar vein, some US E-5s are called hasa by the ROKA members, as their status is one of an NCO.
History
The various ranks of byeong are denoted by stripes worn laterally on a service member's left sleeve. An even lower rank, that of mudeungbyeong (무등병; 無等兵; lit. 'soldier with no rank'), also known as hullyeonbyeong (훈련병; 訓鍊兵; lit.
“Bing (rank)” enters the record as military rank. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bing, rank and military can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 11, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5004050. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bing (rank)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.