China's most famous sabre-rattling general has picked the fight of his life by opening a microblog account and entering the “battleground” of Chinese domestic public opinion.
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Major General Luo Yuan, whose recent suggestions include turning the Japanese-administered Islands, known as Diaoyu in China and Senkaku in Japan, into a Chinese target range, entered the microblogging internet fray to debate a university professor who argued he was “crazy” to advocate bombing Tokyo.
“Weibo is a very important public opinion battleground,” wrote Gen Luo, warming up to a typically spirited opening salvo on his account with Sina weibo, a hugely popular Twitter-like service, on February 21. “We can no longer be silent, for you either explode in silence, or die in it.”
“For our beloved country, beloved Party, beloved army, beloved people, we should fight!” he wrote.
Gen Luo, recently retired from the Academy of Military Science and now Deputy Secretary-General of the China Society of Military Science, denied he had advocated bombing Tokyo.
But his entry into the public opinion battlefield has been explosive, nonetheless.
In less than a week he has attracted 237,000 weibo followers and his first post alone has attracted more than 33,700 comments and been forwarded 37,800 times as of 2pm Sydney time.
But efforts by propaganda authorities to delete negative comments could not hide that his foray has been a bruising one.
"If weibo is the battlefield between pro-state voices and civil society, then it looks like General Luo has hopelessly lost his first encounter,” said Xiao Qiang, an adjunct professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and founder of China Digital Times.
Chinese netizens wondered why Gen Luo was fighting for the Communist Party and the military before “beloved people" and whether PLA generals should be so actively involved in politics.
And when he urged the people to fight with Party boss Xi Jinping against “traitors” and “corrupt” officials they suggested he begin his mission at home.
They noted that Gen Luo, as the princeling son of a former national intelligence chief, has siblings who are extensively involved in business.
And when he appeared to be caught over the weekend using his own weibo account to praise himself – “Gen Luo Yuan is a solider as well as a scholar… his suggestions are very reasonable and show his expertise” – they asked how this general could defend the country if he could not protect his weibo password.
“If the national security professional can't even change his password then the people really should be worried,” said Kaifu Lee, an IT entrepreneur who was the founding president of Google China, writing on his own weibo account.
