Zhang Zhaozhong posts a selfie on his new Sina Weibo account. 

A retired military expert and PLA general has been successfully making inroads in China’s new media landscape, and his latest victory is on Sina Weibo, China’s largest micro-blogging site.

Zhang Zhaozhong, a 65-year-old retired rear admiral and TV commentator, has already established himself as an online celebrity, carving out a place for himself on many reality TV and Internet platforms. Tapping into this popular sentiment, Zhang created a personal Weibo account on the morning of Oct. 24. Again, he was bombarded with cheers of encouragement, with some netizens cheering, “Salute the chief!”

Zhang published a post to greet Weibo users on Monday morning, and later a two-minute video he recorded of himself. Within one day, the two posts had collected nearly 400,000 likes and 100,000 comments, pushing Zhang’s follower count up to nearly 1 million.

“I tried shooting a video of myself several times. At first the automatic filter was on, and it made me appear much younger than 65. I asked someone to help me turn it off. This is what I look like and I want to show that honestly,” he said in the video, offering viewers some of his iconic laughter.

Zhang’s unpretentiousness and self-deprecation have won him an excellent reputation among China’s digital generation. He used to be an oft-ridiculed military expert, known for “wacky comments” in his long career as a talking head on military affairs.

On one broadcast in 2013, Zhang told audiences that ropes used to grow kelp could prevent American submarines from entering the Yellow Sea. The following year, he appeared on TV screens all over China to declare that smog might be a good defense against American laser weapons. These and other misguided statements led the Chinese public to mockingly refer to him as “Chief of the Strategic Fool-You Agency.”

It was after his retirement in July 2015 that his luck began to change. He continued to popularize military knowledge, but the Internet offered him a broader stage. Since retirement, Zhang has done broadcasts on live-stream video site Bilibili, audio programs on China’s largest audio app, Qingting FM, and vlogs on news website Ifeng.com. He even shared his extensive weapons knowledge as a video game analyst. Meanwhile, as of late July, more than 600,000 people have subscribed to his public WeChat account.

But despite his versatile and growing social media presence, Zhang hopes above all to remain consistent, fostering a sense of patriotism and love for the army among China’s younger generations.