The Finest Revolutionary Soldiers of the New Era | From "Top Martial Scholar" to "Joint Nerve Center" — A Profile of Central Theater Command Joint Staff Officer Li Can

The Finest Revolutionary Soldiers of the New Era | From "Top Martial Scholar" to "Joint Nerve Center" — A Profile of Central Theater Command Joint Staff Officer Li Can

■ Photos by Wu Jingya, Huang Gaixia, Fu Chao; Graphics by Wu Jingya

Step inside the Central Theater Command Joint Operations Command Center: screens flicker, data streams surge. On the main display, multi-domain situational awareness updates in real time, as contests in the invisible domain feed back simultaneously with the thunder of armor rolling hundreds of kilometers away. Between the workstations, keyboard strokes fall dense as a sudden downpour, and orders flow from here directly to the front lines of exercises. Joint staff officer Li Can is one member of this nerve-center formation.

Li Can (first from left) discussing work with comrades. Photo by Fu Chao

A plan is never the best — only better

In 2023, Li Can passed successive rounds of selection and transferred from an Army battalion commander position into a department of the Central Theater Command Joint Staff Department. Crossing from a "single-service" role into "all-domain joint" operations, a hard battle of capability transformation lay before him.

At his first joint command war game, the commander led in-depth discussion on force disposition and fire coordination. When the conversation turned to air fighter cover for ground assaults and the coordination between armored elements and air power, Li Can found that his head full of force data was momentarily useless. This made him realize: memorizing data and mastering equipment was far from enough — he had to thoroughly understand the underlying operational logic of each service and branch before he could truly enter the joint realm and embed himself in actual combat. "Integrated joint operations (一体化联合作战) have become the basic operational form (基本作战样式). To avoid talking like an outsider and to avoid dropping the ball, I had to urgently supplement my joint thinking (联合思维)."

Fighting for what is needed, learning whatever is lacking. When he could not meet face-to-face with frontline troops, he called them on the phone, asking grassroots commanders and fighters to help him work through his questions, again and again. Colleagues nearby and experts from academies all became teachers for this "joint newcomer." He was a constant presence in the theater command's joint lecture hall. He carved out time to study Air Force, Rocket Force, and other service and branch knowledge, familiarizing himself with the tactical performance of various equipment.

Li Can studying materials in the reading room. Photo by Fu Chao

A joint staff officer must function like an "external brain," providing support for the commander's decisions, while also acting like the "central nervous system," transmitting the commander's intent precisely to the last node. Li Can said: "I have been a cadet, a squad leader, a platoon leader, a staff officer, and a battalion commander. Coming up from the grassroots, I understand the frontline better; having served as a principal officer, I can better understand the commander's intent. For a joint staff officer, the key word is 'joint.'"

What he cares about is whether a plan can actually be implemented at the grassroots level, at the front line. During one research effort, he read through hundreds of thousands of characters of tactical case studies, went through the plan line by line to cut redundancies, added multiple practical combat-handling measures, and the revised plan became a practical blueprint for grassroots combat training and war preparation. Someone suggested compiling classic tactics into a volume with fixed standards; he saw it differently: "A framework can serve as a foundation, but it cannot be used directly to fight a war. Modern warfare changes too fast." To improve efficiency, he designed his own "tactical map-marking multipurpose ruler," dramatically increasing the speed of hand-drawn map marking. Whenever he could join an exercise unit, he squeezed his way in; whenever he could join a training session, he never missed it. Comrades assessed him: "Anything that passes through his hands is rock-solid." Sometimes, after a plan had already been submitted to superiors for approval, he would suddenly conceive a better approach, communicate with comrades and leadership, and go back to report it again — "In Li Can's eyes, a plan is never the best, only better."

Striving to run his own leg of the relay

During the 2015 parade commemorating the 70th anniversary of the victory of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression and the World Anti-Fascist War, Li Can served as a staff officer in the equipment formation command. In 2025, he became a core member of the parade joint command organization, shouldering the burden of overall planning.

Ten years earlier, his colleague Jiang Guo had sat at that same workstation. Jiang Guo said he had noticed this serious and grounded young man at the time. Ten years — this was not merely a succession of workstations, but a solid passing of the baton. Li Can, tempered through years at the grassroots and in staff organs, steadily caught that baton.

"People must be forged through tasks." At the grassroots level, Li Can honed his staff skills and his ability to lead troops in war preparation; after arriving at the theater command, he "took initiative, pursued excellence, communicated well, and always achieved coordinated results in his work," and was "adept at identifying patterns." When a mission arrived and the organization needed someone, he always stepped up — a "mutual commitment running in both directions (双向奔赴)."

Li Can himself felt it: "The weight on my shoulders is different now." During the parade mission, he never took leave to go home, frequently working until two or three in the morning. Late at night, he and his comrades used their desks as beds, catching brief moments of sleep while their minds continued to run through the plans. Comrade Yuan Xiaoqing said: "Li Can can often advance multiple tasks simultaneously on his own." The sustained high-intensity effort caused his blood pressure to rise, and on one occasion he fainted at the war-gaming site. Leadership ordered him to rest; after a brief recovery, he quietly returned to his post and delivered a new version of the plan first thing the next morning. It was through exactly this kind of meticulous calculation that, on the day of the parade, ten thousand personnel and a thousand pieces of equipment converged into a torrent of steel and passed before Tiananmen without a fraction of deviation.

The assessment comrades offered most often was: "In the face of a mission, he always steps forward and takes responsibility." In July 2023, extreme flooding struck Beijing, Tianjin, and Hebei. Li Can was locked to his duty watch position, fighting day and night for more than ten consecutive days, assisting commanders in organizing and directing tens of thousands of rescue troops, continuously integrating massive volumes of hydrological, disaster, and force data, and responding at any moment to changes in the disaster situation and operational requirements. He understood clearly: with thousands of troops looking to the command, at the critical moment of life-and-death rescue, the more precise the command, the more efficient the action, and the sooner the people in the disaster area would receive proper relief. Theater command leadership gave full affirmation: "This is what a joint staff officer should look like!"

Li Can guiding grassroots backbone training. Photo by Fu Chao

"Washing clothes in a dark room" — always ready

At the time, Li Can was serving as a staff officer in a headquarters organ when higher authorities organized an all-military staff officer skills competition. Li Can, with his solid professional skills, rigorous work style, and outstanding overall quality, was successfully selected for the intensive training team.

The training team was full of top performers. In the early phase, Li Can's overall scores held steadily near the top, but the competition was scored on individual events, and when formal selection came, he was not chosen — he was designated as a reserve member. He did not complain. He said calmly: "If I can train alongside them and learn more, it won't have been a wasted trip."

"Training every day alongside the main squad with no guarantee of getting on the field — what's the point?" Faced with incomprehension, Li Can told a story: a person washes clothes in a dark room — no light, no audience — and can only settle down and scrub, again and again. No one sees the process, but as long as you persist until dawn, the moment you push open the door and step into the light, the clean clothes are the best proof. He told this story to his comrades, to his family, and to himself.

When the main squad trained, he followed every session, watching closely to learn from others' strengths; when the main squad rested, he continued to sharpen every staff comprehensive subject — map marking, tactical documents, scenario exercises, and all the rest. On the day of the competition, he performed outstandingly across all subjects, with zero errors throughout. The team took first place overall, and he personally topped the field in the operational calculation subject.

Afterward, someone asked how he had persevered. He said there was nothing special about him — he simply had not given up on his efforts, and had remained in a state of constant readiness for war.

A theater command staff officer's work is buried in countless late nights — no spotlight, no exhilaration of charging across the battlefield, only meticulous verification repeated again and again, micro-adjustments and optimizations one after another, and round after round of bottom-line war gaming. At his desk and in the war-gaming room, Li Can studied and worked through plans repeatedly, dissecting them with precision slice by slice, benchmarking against actual combat, and converting historical experience into planning capability usable in the present. This work appears unremarkable, yet it is solidly woven into the answer sheet of winning battles.

Li Can often uses "washing clothes in a dark room" as a metaphor for the state of war preparation: war may break out tomorrow, but the battlefield never turns on its lights in advance. "Only by repeatedly refining and bottom-lining every link and every detail can you achieve the ability to fight at any moment, and to fight and win (随时能战，战则必胜)."

Carrying this ever-taut sense of crisis and urgency, Li Can, grounded in the theater command's actual mission requirements, took the lead in sorting out multiple sets of contingency response measures, refined full-chain standards, supplemented and improved content for handling extreme special situations (极端特情), and enhanced the fault tolerance and stress resistance of the war-preparation system.

Comrades say: "Working alongside Li Can, you gain capability and get things done."