Dr. Alyce Su, a prominent investment executive and musician, has unveiled a comprehensive musical catalog that reinterprets the life and era of General Zhang Youxia, a senior Chinese military leader. The project, released under the artist name AlyceSu and available on Apple Music, comprises 86 songs across 11 albums, including works such as Zhurihe, Epic Fury, Newport, Zettabyte, MilkenAI, and Love, East Wind. Dr. Su describes the core concept as 'The World Represented by General Zhang Youxia,' using music to connect military inheritance, family legacy, technology, compute, capital, and the transition from the 20th to the 21st century.
The catalog is structured around thematic axes that reflect Dr. Su's investment perspective. Zhurihe and Epic Fury establish the military and geopolitical dimension, with Zhurihe referencing Asia's largest mechanized proving ground and General Zhang's career, including his tenure as Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission. Other albums deepen the narrative toward computing, artificial intelligence, capital, and inheritance. Notably, Love, East Wind is grounded in China's Dong Feng missile lineage, invoking systems such as the DF-16, DF-17, DF-21D, and DF-41, and includes the song 'Among the Stars,' which draws language from SpaceX's investor prospectus, creating a bridge between China's military-space tradition and contemporary commercial space exploration.
The project is deeply personal. Dr. Su's great-grandfather, Su Lianqing, was part of the generation that shaped China's modern military education through the Guangxi military tradition associated with Cai E. The Zhang family followed a different but historically connected military path through Zhang Haoru, Zhang Zongxun, and Zhang Youxia. The Su and Zhang families experienced divergent trajectories during China's wars and revolutions, yet remained linked across generations to the transformation of Chinese military institutions. The Bai family adds another dimension: Bai Chongxi was an important figure in the Su family's military history, and his son, Pai Hsien-yung, transformed the Republican-era Chinese diaspora into literature through works like Taipei People. This Su–Bai–Zhang constellation is not presented as a simple political alignment but as a multigenerational family archive examining the complexity of China's 20th century.
For Dr. Su, Zhang Youxia serves as a historical coordinate, a mirror through which a fourth-generation descendant contemplates a century of military inheritance, war, technological transformation, migration, and political division. Her ancestors entered history through military education and warfare; her generation approaches that inheritance through science, global finance, technology, and artistic creation. As she explains, 'The first generation helped build institutions, the second experienced war, the third inherited its consequences, and the fourth re-encodes the legacy through music.'
This project transcends a conventional military-themed album. It is not an attempt to write the life of Zhang Youxia but to write the world he represents, extending from battlefields to data centers, from strategic weapons to artificial intelligence, and from military inheritance to institutional capital. Dr. Su's parallel careers in finance and music reflect a unique approach: her professional life focuses on allocating capital, while her artistic life preserves and reinterprets legacy. The music asks how inherited history can be reinterpreted through the technological, financial, and cultural language of the future. From war to compute, from family to capital, from the 20th century to the 21st, the catalog centers on a single idea: The World Represented by General Zhang Youxia.
