Liu Yazhou, a 53 year-old PLA general, erstwhile novelist, and rising political star.
A son-in-law of the late Chinese president Li Xiannian, Liu is a “princeling” (privileged offspring of a high official) who was promoted quickly and is now Deputy Political Commissar and a Lieutenant General in the PLA Air Force. He has traveled extensively overseas, including a term as a visiting professor at Stanford University, and is one of the few PLA officials to have visited Taiwan.
Liu’s first big splash was an essay on the October 1949 Jinmen battle circulated on the Internet last year, when tensions between China and Taiwan prompted hawks in Beijing to urge a military showdown, putting enormous pressure on the civilian leadership [1]. Liu reviewed the lessons of the Jinmen debacle, in which a PLA invasion was routed by Guomindang forces, with the loss of more than 9,000 troops. He attributes the devastating loss to complacency, along with poor planning and command.
According to Liu, history threatened to repeat itself in the late 1990s when hardline officials argued that Taiwan must be fought and that victory was certain. Disclosing a previously unseen Jiang Zemin quote—“A war in the Taiwan Strait is inevitable” (“Lessons of the Jinmen Battle”
—without providing the context, he argues that the lessons of Jinmen must be heeded, especially because the Taiwan issue is now internationalized and considerably more complicated.
The projection of Chinese influence in international affairs should be specifically calibrated to the West in general and United States in particular, Liu argues. Citing Huntington’s thesis on the clash of civilizations, Liu views the alleged clash between the West and the Muslim world as a great opportunity. He argues in “The Grand National Strategy” that China’s improved relations with Muslim countries are an excellent move, since China “should do what the West fears.” In a moment of great exuberance, Liu maintains that China should have an outlet to the Indian Ocean, what he terms “China’s new boundary.”
Liu is more ambivalent about Sino-U.S. relations. While he acknowledges that the United States, as the world’s dominant power, will inevitably pursue policies that antagonize China, he believes America realizes that the forces for bilateral cooperation are greater than conflict. U.S. leaders would never instigate a full-fledged military confrontation. The United States is to be regarded as neither a wholesale enemy nor an ally.
Militarily, he urges Chinese leaders to learn from U.S. innovations in the military and its recruitment system. China’s military strategy is obsolete, he says in “Faith and Morality,” as its experts today still strategize of a “people’s war” of “luring the enemy into a trap.” It is a ‘tragedy’ that in China, from the top to the bottom, “those who are intelligent do not make policy, those who make policy are not intelligent.”
The oppressed peasantry, Liu continues, which poses the greatest challenge to communist orthodoxy, must be thoroughly liberated and turned into citizens able to engage in active political participation. If political reform is further delayed, revolution from below may occur, he warns in “Conversation.”
See thats just what I have been trying to tell you.
http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news]=3891
What do all of the other generals say? What does the Economist and the Financial times say?
