One cloudless morning last month, Col. Liu Mingfu watched on his home television as tanks, troop carriers and ballistic missiles rolled past a waving President Xi Jinping in Tiananmen Square. The Communist Party was putting on a military parade, billed as one of the largest in party history, to commemorate the defeat of Japan seven decades earlier.
“I felt inspired and proud, since the parade demonstrated a major power’s determination and strength to safeguard peace,” Mr. Liu said in an interview. “Japanese militarism, the world hegemon and global terrorism have been threatening the peace.”
“The world hegemon” refers, of course, to the U.S., which the colonel has been studying for years. For many Chinese, Mr. Liu, 64, is the most prominent warrior-scholar in the People’s Liberation Army. His fame rests on The China Dream , a book published in 2010 that became a best seller.
It dissected American global dominance and advocated the need for China to overturn that to secure peace not just in the region but also worldwide. “Becoming the strongest nation in the world is China’s goal in the 21st century,” the colonel wrote.
At the time, he and other hard-line military thinkers were dismissed as marginal voices by many foreign analysts. But two years after the book’s publication, Mr. Xi took power and proclaimed his own “China Dream” of restoring the nation’s greatness, a critical part of which is expanding the nation’s military presence in Asia. Now, the military hard-liners are looking more mainstream.
It is appropriate then that the first English edition of Mr. Liu’s The China Dream was released in May by CN Times Books, a publishing company based in New York that was founded by a former employee of the Beijing municipal propaganda bureau.
Speaking to a reporter in a restaurant in central Beijing one afternoon, Mr. Liu laid out his vision of the biggest geopolitical rivalry of this century. “There are flames around Asia, and every place could be a battlefield in the future,” he said. “That’s all caused by the invisible hand of the U.S. Without the black hand of the U.S., Asia would be more peaceful and stable.”
In the colonel’s eyes, China finally has a leader who is bold enough to resist the U.S. “China was once called the sleeping lion in the East, but now we have been awakened, and Xi Jinping is the leading lion of the lion packs, who dare to fight anytime.”
“The biggest threat China faces today is the military crisis,” Mr. Liu said. “There’s a huge gap in the military between China and the U.S.”
That message is consistent with views expressed in recent years by Mr. Xi. Mr. Xi has said that the military needs to modernise to make itself combat ready, and that the corruption that has weakened the military must be rooted out.
“Corruption has assaulted the PLA in a rather severe way,” Mr. Liu said, pointing to, among other ills, the widespread selling of posts.
After growing up in the eastern Chinese province of Shandong, Mr. Liu entered the army in 1969. Ten years later, he joined the political department of the Jinan Military Command, eventually becoming its head. From 1998 until his retirement in 2011, he taught politics and military strategy at the National Defense University and became the chief of the school’s Research Institute for Military Buildup. The colonel said his intellectual interest lies in Marxist theory and Mao Zedong thought, as well as the “political work” of the Chinese military. — New York Times News Service
