By John Garnaut
Some Communist Party "princelings" can be disparaging, even contemptuous, about the leaders to whom they have delegated authority for running the country over the past two decades. They broadly agree that their time has come because China is stuck.
But that's where the common ground ends. Hundreds of children of eminent revolutionaries, with competing beliefs, interests and lineages, are jostling for a stake in China's future. But first they have to fight for their ancestral past.
Nostalgia ... performers take to the stage at a Beijing restaurant this week. As China prepares to mark the 90th anniversary of the Communist Party, ''red'' themed activities are becoming increasingly popular.Credit: AP Photo/Ng Han Guan
"History is a genuine depiction of the past, but it can never be completely genuine," writes General Liu Yuan, in a preface to a book with the same name, Changing Our View of History and Culture.
For anyone who misses the point: "History is a mirror which reflects the present, and the future as well!"
New democracy ... General Liu Yuan is demanding a return to the basics of the Chinese Communist Party's ideology.
Liu's father, Liu Shaoqi, was China's second-ranked leader until he was vilified in 1968 and then airbrushed out of history after dying in jail in 1969. Liu writes his father back into contemporary relevance while also boosting the patriarchal claims of his institutional vehicle, the People's Liberation Army.
"The character zu in zuguo (Motherland) is from male worship, and refers to male ancestors," writes Liu. "So strictly speaking, it is right to sing, "Fatherland, Dear Father!"
Liu's glorification of violence, including apparent sympathy for "planes flying into skyscrapers", is "truly amazing", says Warren Sun, an authority on elite Communist Party history at Monash University. But most interesting, says Sun, is Liu's advocacy for a return to the ideologies of Mao and his own father.
"Both Liu Yuan and [fellow expected next president] Xi Jinping are demanding a return to the founding fathers and to the basics of the party's ideology," says Sun, referring to a speech by Xi last week.
Together with the Mao-singing antics of a third important princeling, Bo Xilai, this begins to explain China's backsliding on economic reform and aggression in foreign policy in recent years.
Bo Zhiyue, of the National University of Singapore, says the leadership is at a crossroads, its retreat to socialist ideology being driven by fear, and now "there is also jockeying for power among princelings in the name of the legacies of their fathers".
Before the princeling challengers make room for their fathers on history's stage they first have to cut the winners down to size. And modern China has only had one paramount winner: Deng Xiaoping.
Perhaps the most challenging and unpredictable aspect of Liu's essay is his blunt rejection of Deng's ''No Debate'' edict from 1992.
Liu and other less significant princelings are challenging Deng's economic legacy from the left, arguing at least for an end to the "open" part of "opening and reform". But Deng's conservative political legacy is being challenged from all directions.
When General Liu launched the book that his essay prefaced he was accompanied by several other sabre-rattling generals and also Caixin editor Hu Shuli. Hu is leading China's liberal media with her daring but carefully calibrated exposes and commentaries.
Next to Hu was Wu Si, an esteemed liberal intellectual, who edits Yanhuang Chunqiu, an equally daring and carefully calibrated magazine that consistently challenges the Communist Party's historical fabrications.
Wu says General Liu believes in New Democracy, within the rubric of one-party rule, but he is more interested in democracy without the qualifications. And his presence was enough to show they can all agree on ending the era of ''No Debate''.
"I'm not worried about different opinions," he told the Herald.
The princeling battle over China's history has taken a decidedly leftist turn of late, but the end of China's "No Debate" era has only just begun.