Recently, there was a leak of the footage of the non-public trial of General Xu Qinxian, who was charged and convicted of insubordination and sentanced to a stripping of his military ranks and 5 years in prison.
It has gone semi viral, with the full 6 hour trial reaching 1 million views on youtube.
I have begun watching it myself [currently at 1 hour] and taking notes as I see important, and read a couple articles on the matter.
A few things I've noticed off the bat
- The issue Xu has seems to both be a use of force issue, but also an issue of whom the orders originate from.
Xu in fact states that he was fine with deploying the army to the outskirts of Beijing to encourage a "political solution" to the matter.
Xu has also stated multiple times that he wished for the NPC to meet and deliberate on the action and use of the army. He, at least to me, implies that if the NPC ordered him to, then he would have complied. He seems to have a major problem with the army taking orders from the party.
2.Xu also seems concerned less with the morality of the situation, but with the potential for him to lose face should the operation have gone badly. I don't think this is entirely unfounded, and at a certain point I think it's fair that the orders be given in writing [although obviously I don't know standard procedure in the PLA]. At one points he states "If this could be pulled off, one could be seen as a hero. If it goes poorly, then one could be seen as historical sinners." Or something to that effect.
Xu does have conscious objections, but those seem to be less of a concern. For instance, he states that he believed that the the police and garrison forces could deal with the situation on their own. He also questioned the equipment being brought into the city [LMGs, HMGs, AA guns, etc.]
I'll hold off on a full judgement on issues until I've watched it fully, however. If anyone else has any input feel free to add anything to what I've said here.
Cheng Enfu is a CPC economist and director of the Chinese academy of marxism who translates a lot of his stuff into English [in fact i think he does so himself if i remember right]. I've only read "China's Economic Dialectic: The original aspirations of reform" so far, but he also has a couple textbooks titled "Modern Political Economy; a new coursebook" and "the creation of value by living labor." China's Economic Dialectic is available from international publishers while the course books are available from Canut Press, so luckily you don't have to use Amazon for him.
Edit: Springer also publishes a series of textbooks called "China Insights." I haven't read them yet, but they're written and translated by Chinese authors which is definitely nice compared to what you usually get. Springer gives institutional access, but all [or at least some of the books] are available on sci-hub.