The United States has its China hawks, and Liu is essentially an America hawk within China. After the initial publication of Liu’s book, Phillip C. Saunders of the U.S. National Defense University called it a “sensationalist” tract “aimed at tapping into a profitable mass market ... rather than [promoting] political orthodoxy,” and the book appears to have put its publisher briefly at odds with the government. The Wall Street Journal reported that The China Dream “flew off the shelves but was pulled over concerns it could damage relations with the U.S.” In the Xi era, however, the Journal’s Jeremy Page spotted it in the “recommended books” section of a state-run bookstore. (Liu told Page he didn’t know whether Xi himself had read it, but said Xi’s “China Dream” speeches had sent “a strong message.”)

Liu is representative of a new class of pundits in China that former Financial Times Beijing bureau chief Geoff Dyer has compared to America’s “TV generals,” retired officers who opine on military matters in the media. “In the last few years,” Dyer wrote in his book The Contest of the Century, “something similar has happened in China. A small number of media-friendly members of the armed forces have begun to talk openly about military matters, including their mistrust of and distaste for the U.S. military and its policies in Asia. ... In some ways, Senior Colonel Liu Mingfu is the latest addition to their numbers.”

The colonel has now retired from the military, and the path to global dominance he laid out five years ago was a bit more flexible than Xi’s; Liu reckoned it might take China another five decades to replace the United States as world leader. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has called the book an example of a “triumphalist” strain in Chinese thinking, which argues that “no matter how much China commits itself to a ‘peaceful rise,’ conflict is inherent in U.S.-China relations.” Kissinger noted that the hawks’ vision of inevitable U.S.-China conflict hasn’t been endorsed by either the Chinese or the American governments, but that “if the assumptions of these views were applied by either side—and it would only take one side to make it unavoidable—China and the U.S. could easily fall into an escalating tension.”

What follows is a condensed excerpt of one Chinese hawk’s view of what the “China Age” will look like, and his roadmap for how China will get there. It outlines a vision of Chinese superiority informed by the experience of America’s own rise to superpower status and conduct as the world’s preeminent power. His descriptions are general, and his prescriptions vague, but he asserts that the Chinese century will be a democratic one. If this strikes Americans as incongruous given China’s domestic system, Liu’s contention is that America itself is only “half democratic”—electing its leaders at home but “autocratic in the world.” He continues: “Americans overrate themselves and evaluate themselves untruthfully by saying that they are a democratic country.” And it is China that in Liu’s view can provide the “checks and balances” against America necessary to “form a democratic world.”