Pro-democracy general could help shape Xi's vision for China

Want China Times, Staff Reporter 2013-03-31

Liu Yazhou presents before the Indonesian Ministry of Defense in Jakarta
last year. (Photo/Xinhua)

One of president Xi Jinping's closest military advisors is general Liu Yazhou, the political commissar at the PLA's National Defense University and son-in law of former Chinese president Li Xiannian. The 60-year-old is said to part of Xi's inner circle and political commentators believe that Liu, widely known for his pro-democracy stance, has and will continue to play a vital role in shaping the president's strategies and world view.

Liu was born in eastern China's Anhui province in 1962 and joined the PLA during the Cultural Revolution. He was selected by the army at the age of 20 to study English at Wuhan University in central Hubei province, and was later a visiting scholar in Asian language studies at Stanford University in the US. During his time in America, Liu was once said to have confidently claimed that China would be ruled democratically within 10 years.

The general is known for his pro-democracy stance, with his support for a democratic China beginning in the early 1980s when he was a military reporter for the PLA. When he was not reporting on the army, Liu penned several novels, some of which stirred controversy in China as they were judged to bear a pro-democracy slant and belittle the country's military power.

In 1996, Liu joined the political department of the Beijing military region air force and later became the political commissar of the air force in Chengdu, the provincial capital of southwestern Sichuan. In December 2009, he switched to the PLA's National Defense University to lecture elite military officers and was promoted to general in April last year.

In an internal speech to mid-level officers in 2009, Liu supported the decision of former PLA general Xu Qinxian to refuse to suppress student demonstrators during the violent Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.

A year later, in an interview with the Hong Kong-based Phoenix Weekly magazine, Liu boldly claimed that China must either embrace US-style democracy or accept a Soviet-style collapse.

"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," the magazine quoted Liu as saying.

"The secret of the United States' success is neither due to Wall Street nor Silicon Valley, but its long surviving rule of law and the system behind it. 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," he said.

When penning the foreword to China Dream: The Great Power Thinking and Strategic Positioning of China in the Post-American Age by Liu Mingfu, a professor at Beijing's National Defense University, Liu said that the 21st century is a race between China and the US, and the winner will be the country that can develop better and best lead the world.

Xi Jinping delivers a speech at the Moscow 

State Institute of International Relations on

March 23. (Photo/Xinhua)

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