Wu Shengli
Chinese general
Wu Shengli (Chinese: 吴胜利; born August 1945) is a retired Chinese admiral who served as commander of the People's Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) from 2006 to 2017. Prior to that, he served as PLA's deputy chief of staff, commander of the South Sea Fleet and commandant principal of Dalian Naval Academy.
Wu presided over the PLAN during a time of expanding Chinese maritime interests and increased regional tensions. The PLAN grew under his tenure from a coastal defense force to an emerging expeditionary force. His tenure was marked by a litany of achievements and historic firsts, including the PLAN's first deployment of a counter-piracy task force to the Gulf of Aden in 2008, the first evacuation of foreign nationals from a distant country during the 2011 Libyan Civil War, and the commissioning of China's first aircraft carrier Liaoning in 2012.
Early life and education
Wu Shengli was born in Wuqiao, Hebei Province in August 1945. He is the son of Wu Xian (吴宪), who was a Red Army political commissar during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War. The elder Wu later held important political positions during the Mao years, including mayor of Hangzhou and vice governor of Zhejiang Province. Due to his parentage, Wu Shengli is considered a "princeling" in Chinese political parlance.
Wu enlisted in the PLA Navy in August 1964, and joined the Chinese Communist Party at the same time.
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This entry incorporates text from “Wu Shengli” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.