Napoleon, who once commanded thousands of armies and swept across the European continent, once said: "A soldier who does not want to be a general is not a good soldier." However, in both war and peacetime, it is difficult to grow from an ordinary soldier to a commander in chief. For General Zhang Li, who went all the way from an ordinary worker and eventually became a general of the Republic, he was able to complete such a counterattack and transformation because of his spirit of "not afraid of hardship", "not afraid of tiredness" and "not afraid of difficulties".
In 1943, Zhang Li was born in a peasant family in Qingzhou, Shandong. Therefore, despite the poverty of the family, his parents still paid great attention to his education. When he was five years old, his father sent him to a private school in the village with the only two buckets of wheat left in the family, and since then he has received a traditional education, and in the first year of private school, he has a talent and knows nearly 2,000 words, which is amazing!
After finishing primary school, Zhang Li was admitted to a local middle school with excellent grades. But because his family was really unable to spend money on his studies, he went to a public vocational school that did not cost money when he had not graduated from middle school, and was successfully admitted.
At the end of the 50s of the last century, he was assigned to the machine factory and the paper mill as a grassroots worker by the school. When he worked in the paper mill, he had access to a large number of old books in the raw material warehouse, and he would read all kinds of books, magazines, newspapers and periodicals every day after work, which laid a solid foundation for him to have excellent theoretical ability when he later took up important positions.
In 1964, the leaders of the factory approached Zhang Li and hoped that he could join the army, and he agreed. Many years ago, he and his family fled to escape the Japanese invaders, and did not return home until the victory of the Anti-Japanese War. However, when he returned to his hometown, he found that the original bustling village had been burned to the ground by the Japanese invaders, and since he was a child, he has often been cared for by his neighbors, and since he was a child, he has told himself that he must always remember the kindness of his fellow villagers and do his best to serve the country when he grows up.
After enlisting in the army, Zhang Li became an ordinary soldier of the engineering regiment of the Jinan Military Region, he was not afraid of hardship, he was not afraid of being tired, and he soon made a name for himself in the army. In 1968, he was transferred to the Lanzhou Military Region and worked as an officer in the Propaganda Section of the Political Department of the Engineer Corps. Since then, he has been struggling in the northwest for more than ten years, during which he has traveled all over the northwest provinces because of the implementation of various tasks in the army, and has also crossed the Tanggula Mountain and crossed the Lancang River and the Nu River. After years of hard work, he was steadily promoted in the army, and in 1982, he was transferred to the office of the military region headquarters and served as General Xiao Hua's secretary.
It is worth mentioning that he was just 39 years old at the time, and as the youngest founding general on the mainland, General Xiao Hua was also 39 years old when he was awarded the rank of general.
In 1984, Zhang Li left the Lanzhou Military Region and went to the General Office of the Central Military Commission to serve as a division-level secretary. A few years later, he was transferred to the General Staff Department, where he successively served as director of the Political Department of the Engineering Department of the General Staff Department and director of the Political Department of the General Staff Department, and was promoted to the rank of major general in 1997. At the turn of the millennium, at the age of 57, he assumed the post of deputy chief of general staff of the new PLA, during which he worked diligently and made important contributions to the modernization and development of our army, and at the same time participated in many military and diplomatic activities in the field of foreign affairs on the mainland.
In 2004, at the age of 61, General Zhang Li was promoted to the rank of general, and five years later, due to his age, he retired from active duty and joined the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) to continue to make suggestions for the country's development and construction. From a student to a worker, from a soldier to a general, General Zhang Li has relied on his spirit of "three fears" along the way to become an outstanding general of the people's army from an ordinary rural teenager, and has fulfilled his wish to serve the country when he was a teenager.
In his later years, General Zhang, who loved to write since his youth, often buried himself in books, wrote books and said, and published a novel "Soul and Dream Comes True", which comprehensively showed the process of difficult exploration of the Chinese revolution with a huge work, and is a revolutionary epic with rich connotations, which is worthy of our learning!