The leadership's decision to appoint a liberal-leaning officer to the heights of the army is part of the party's effort to refashion its image as open-minded and inclusive, analysts say.
Liu Yazhou, who once warned his hawkish military colleagues that China must embrace US-style democracy or accept a Soviet-style collapse, was promoted on Monday from lieutenant general to full general, along with three others in the PLA.
Liu, 60, has been supporting democracy since the early 1980s when he was a military reporter for the PLA. When he was not reporting on the army, he was penning military novels that enjoyed some success. Liu is the political commissar for the National Defence University.
He comes from a princeling background, with his father, Liu Jiande , a senior army official and his wife the youngest daughter of late president Li Xiannian. He learned English while at university and read a wide range of Western works, which would later help him explain Western thinking to his countrymen.
'Liu was a torchbearer who helped the Chinese people keep up with the world's military advances through his articles in the 1980s, as the country was waking up from the Cultural Revolution,' said Ni Lexiong , director of a research centre on sea power and defence policy at Shanghai University of Political Science and Law.
'Liu's promotion indicates the party and the PLA want to polish an image that they are going to recruit people with different political views.'
In an internal speech to mid-level officers in 2009, Liu approved of a decision by two former PLA generals, Xu Qinxian and He Yanran , to refuse to suppress protesters in Tiananmen Square in 1989.