A highly-placed PLA general well known for his staunchly pro-democracy stance is a close military adviser of China’s new president Xi Jinping, according to an article Tuesday in Want China Times.
General Liu Yazhou, 60, is political commissar at the PLA’s National Defense University and son-in-law of former China president Li Xiannian. Liu is seen by commentators as having played a key role in shaping Xi’s worldview because of his position within Xi’s inner circle.
In 2009 Liu delivered a speech to mid-level officers expressing support for the decision of former PLA general Xu Qinxian to refuse to suppress student demonstrators occupying Tiananmen Square in June of 1989. A year later he told an interviewer from Hong Kong-based Phoenix Weekly that China must either adopt US-style democracy or collapse like the Soviet Union just months after Tiananmen,
“If a system fails to let its citizens breathe freely and release their creativity to the maximum extent, and fails to put those who best represent the system and its people into leadership positions, it is certain to perish,” Liu is quoted as saying in the magazine.
“A bad system makes a good person behave badly, while a good system makes a bad person behave well. Democracy is the most urgent thing; without it there can be no sustainable growth.”
Despite his fervently reformist views, Liu’s career doesn’t seem to have suffered. In 2010 he was promoted to his current post as political commissar of the National Defense University from his earlier post as deputy commissar of the PLA Air Force. Last April he was promoted from the rank of lieutenant general to a full four-star general.
Liu sees the 21st century as a race between China and the US, with the victory going to the nation that can develop into a society better able to lead the world, according to his foreward to China Dream: The Great Power Thinking and Strategic Positioning of China in the Post-American Age by Liu Mingfu, a Beijing National Defense University professor.
Liu’s views are all the more remarkable for a man born in 1952 in Anhui province who joined the PLA during the Cultural Revolution. At the age of 20 he was chosen to study English at Wuhan University. He became fluent enough to serve as a Stanford University visiting scholar in Asian languages. While in the US Liu declared that China’s government would become democratic within 10 years.
Liu’s stance on democracy began emerging in the early 1980s when he was a PLA military reporter for the PLA. In his spare time he wrote several novels which became controversial by their pro-democracy bias and their perceived scorn for the nation’s military power.
In 1996 Liu joined the political department of the air force, then became political commissar of the air force in Chengdu in Sichuan province. In December 2009 he was transferred to the PLA’s National Defense University to lecture elite military officers. Liu’s apparent freedom to express controversial views may reflect in part the privilege accorded by his family background. His father was a senior military officer while his father-in-law was Li Xiannian, one of China’s “Eight Immortals” as well as a president.
Liu’s output of essays throughout his career have been remarkable for both the breadth of their subject matter and the apparent freedom he enjoyed to express positions that appeared directly to contradict those of China’s top leaders.
One of his most notable essays urges Beijing to stop obsessing over the retaking of Taiwan because placing the nation’s focus on that goal merely gives more leverage to both the US and Taiwan.
He is also credited with advocating China’s current policy of shifting development resources away from the developed coastal areas toward the inland regions and central Asia with their wealth of resources. Yet he has warned against placing too much importance on wealth.
“A nation that is mindful only of the power of money is a backward and stupid nation,” he has written. “‘What we could believe in is the power of the truth. The truth is knowledge and knowledge is power.”
His most controversial essays and speeches have dwelled on the superiority of the American political system — a remarkable fact considering that his job as a commissar is to inculcate the proper political orientation among top military officers.
“The secret of US success is neither Wall Street nor Silicon Valley, but its long-surviving rule of law and the system behind it,” he has written. “The American system is said to be ‘designed by genius and for the operation of the stupid’.
“A bad system makes a good person behave badly while a good system makes a bad person behave well,” he has also written, in praise of US-style democracy.
Yet Liu is also surprisingly nationalistic. He has called for China to acquire an outlet to the Indian Ocean, calling it “China’s new boundary.” He has also written on the use of divide and conquer tactics to boost China’s power relative to the US and its allies.
Despite his call for China to move toward a US-style democracy, Liu is ambivalent in his views about Beijing’s proper relationship with Washington. As the world’s dominant power the US will inevitably pursue policies that antagonize China, he has written. Yet he firmly rejects the possibility that the US will initiate war against China because it has more to gain from cooperation than conflict. On balance he sees the US as a geopolitical rival rather than an enemy or an ally.
In at least one important way Liu’s views appear not to have been embraced by Xi. Liu believes the collapse of the Soviet Union came about because Moscow was too late in embracing political reforms. Xi, on the other hand, has declared in recent speeches that the Soviet Union’s collapsed because its leaders failed to stand up to defend the party.
Of course Xi’s first order of business as a new leader is consolidating power by reassuring those key party leaders in the Politburo that he is a staunch defender of the Party. It remains to be seen whether Liu’s pro-democracy views will influence Xi’s policies once he’s more secure in his post as China’s leader.
