The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower
336
The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower
336Hardcover
-
SHIP THIS ITEMTemporarily Out of Stock Online
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
For more than forty years, the United States has played an indispensable role helping the Chinese government build a booming economy, develop its scientific and military capabilities, and take its place on the world stage, in the belief that China's rise will bring us cooperation, diplomacy, and free trade. But what if the "China Dream" is to replace us, just as America replaced the British Empire, without firing a shot?
Based on interviews with Chinese defectors and newly declassified, previously undisclosed national security documents, The Hundred-Year Marathon reveals China's secret strategy to supplant the United States as the world's dominant power, and to do so by 2049, the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Michael Pillsbury, a fluent Mandarin speaker who has served in senior national security positions in the U.S. government since the days of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, draws on his decades of contact with the "hawks" in China's military and intelligence agencies and translates their documents, speeches, and books to show how the teachings of traditional Chinese statecraft underpin their actions. He offers an inside look at how the Chinese really view America and its leaders – as barbarians who will be the architects of their own demise.
Pillsbury also explains how the U.S. government has helped – sometimes unwittingly and sometimes deliberately – to make this "China Dream" come true, and he calls for the United States to implement a new, more competitive strategy toward China as it really is, and not as we might wish it to be. The Hundred-Year Marathon is a wake-up call as we face the greatest national security challenge of the twenty-first century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781627790109 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 02/03/2015 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 228,249 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.30(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Introduction
Wishful Thinking
"Deceive the heavens to cross the ocean."
—The Thirty-Six Stratagems
At noon on November 30, 2012, beneath a clear late-autumn sky, Wayne Clough, the white-bearded, affable secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, appeared before a collection of cameras and microphones. As he spoke, a cold wind blew across the National Mall. The audience stood bundled in their overcoats as a representative of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton held aloft a mysterious gold medal. The Smithsonian’s honored guest that day was the famed Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang, who had been feted the night before at a tony gala inside the Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Asian Art—an event cohosted by my wife, Susan. Some four hundred guests, among them House minority leader Nancy Pelosi, Princess Michael of Kent, and the seventy-four-year-old widow of the shah of Iran, clinked glasses to celebrate the Chinese-American relationship and to catch a glimpse of Cai, who had won international acclaim for his awe-inspiring fireworks display during the opening ceremony of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Cai was known to celebrate Chinese symbols with performance art, and had once used lighted fires to extend the Great Wall by ten kilometers so it could be better seen from space. Our evening gala raised more than $1 million for the Smithsonian and made the social pages of various newspapers and magazines.1
The following day, as Cai was introduced, he was dressed in a Western-style suit, gray overcoat, and orange-red scarf. A trim, handsome man with graying hair, he looked out upon the Mall and the subject of his latest piece of performance art, a four-story-tall Christmas tree decorated with two thousand explosive devices.
As Cai twisted a handheld trigger, his audience watched the tree explode before their eyes, with thick black smoke emerging from the branches. Cai twisted the trigger again, and the tree exploded a second time, then a third. The five-minute display sent pine needles across the vast lawn in all directions and dense black smoke—symbolizing China’s invention of gunpowder—billowing up the façade of the Smithsonian’s iconic red sandstone castle.2 It would take two months to clean up the debris and residue left by the explosion.
I don’t know if any of the guests contemplated why they were watching a Chinese artist blow up a symbol of the Christian faith in the middle of the nation’s capital less than a month before Christmas. In that moment, I’m not sure that even I appreciated the subversion of the gesture; I clapped along with the rest of the audience. Perhaps sensing the potential controversy, a museum spokesman told the Washington Post, "The work itself is not necessarily about Christmas."3 Indeed, the museum labeled Cai’s performance simply, "Explosive Event," which, if one thinks about it, is not much more descriptive than what Cai called it on his own website: "Black Christmas Tree."4
Secretary Clinton’s aide waved the gold medal for the press corps to see, as Cai smiled modestly. He had just been given the State Department’s Medal of Arts, the first of its kind, which was presented to the artist by Clinton herself, along with $250,000, courtesy of the American taxpayer. The medal was awarded, she said, for the artist’s "contributions to the advancement of understanding and diplomacy."5 Cai seemed to agree with the sentiment: "All artists are like diplomats," he said. "Sometimes art can do things that politics cannot."6
I was a little suspicious and mentioned Cai the next day during a secret meeting with a senior Chinese government defector. He was incredulous at the award and explosion. We scoured the Internet. I wanted to investigate Cai and his works of art a little more closely. I didn’t bother reading the English articles proclaiming Cai’s genius, but rather what the Chinese were saying on various Mandarin-language websites about one of their most acclaimed citizens.
Cai, it turned out, has quite a large following inside China. He was and remains arguably the most popular artist in the country, with the notable exception of Ai Weiwei. Many of Cai’s fans were nationalists, and applauded him for blowing up Western symbols before a Western audience. China’s nationalists called themselves ying pai, meaning "hawks" or "eagles." Many of these ying pai are generals and admirals and government hard-liners. Few Americans have ever met them. They are the Chinese officials and authors I know the best because since 1973 the U.S. government has instructed me to work with them. Some of my colleagues wrongly dismiss the ying pai as nuts. To me, they represent the real voice of China.7
Cai and the hawks appear to be very supportive of the narrative of the decline of the United States and the rise of a strong China. (By coincidence, his given name, Guo Qiang, means "strong country" in Mandarin.) Cai’s earlier exhibits featured variations on this theme. For instance, while American soldiers were coming under nearly constant assault by IEDs in Afghanistan and Iraq, the artist simulated a car bomb explosion to ask "his viewers to appreciate some kind of redeeming beauty in terrorist attacks and warfare."8 The artist raised eyebrows when he said that the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, was a "spectacle" for the world audience, as if it were—in some twisted sense—a work of art. Shortly after the attacks, an Oxford University professor reported that Cai Guo Qiang proclaimed that his favorite book9 was Unrestricted Warfare: War and Strategy in the Globalization Era, a work of military analysis in which two Chinese colonels recommended that Beijing "use asymmetrical warfare, including terrorism, to attack the United States."10 Even now, Chinese bloggers were enjoying the spectacle of their hero destroying a symbol of the Christian faith only a stone’s throw from the U.S. Capitol. The joke, it appeared, was very much on us.
Only later did I learn that the U.S. officials responsible for the payment to Cai had not known about his background or his dubious artistic strategy. I couldn’t help but feel that my wife and I had also been caught unawares—happy barbarians gleefully ignorant of the deeply subversive performance taking place before us. This wasn’t much different from U.S. policy toward China as a whole. Chinese leaders have persuaded many in the West to believe that China’s rise will be peaceful and will not come at others’ expense, even while they adhere to a strategy that fundamentally rejects this.
We Americans still don’t see China the way it sees us—a condition that has persisted for decades. Why else would the Smithsonian Institution and the State Department pay a famous Chinese artist $250,000 to blow up a Christmas tree on the National Mall? The answer lies, at least in part, in an ancient proverb that says, "Cross the sea in full view" or, in more practical terms, "Hide in plain sight." It is one of the Thirty-Six Stratagems, an essay from ancient Chinese folklore.11 All of these stratagems are designed to defeat a more powerful opponent by using the opponent’s own strength against him, without his knowing he is even in a contest. Perhaps unwittingly, Cai alluded to this idea in remarks he delivered later to an audience at the State Department. "Everyone," he said, "has their little tricks."12
It is generally understood among those of us calling ourselves China experts that our life’s work is devoted to reducing misunderstandings between the United States and China. We have our work cut out for us. Americans have been wrong about China again and again, sometimes with profound consequences. In 1950, the Chinese leadership believed that it had given a clear warning to the United States that its troops should not come too close to the Chinese border during the Korean War, or China would be forced to respond in kind. No one in Washington got that message, and in November of that year Chinese troops surged across the Yalu River into North Korea, engaging U.S. troops in numerous battles before the war was halted by an armistice in 1953, after more than thirty thousand American soldiers had died. The United States also misunderstood China’s relationship with the Soviet Union, the reasons for its overtures to the Nixon administration in the 1970s, its intentions regarding student protesters at Tiananmen Square in 1989, its decision to treat an accidental U.S. bombing of a Chinese embassy in 1999 as an act that Chinese leaders equated with the atrocities of Hitler, and more.
Many of us who study China have been taught to view the country as a helpless victim of Western imperialists—a notion that China’s leaders not only believe, but also actively encourage. When I was studying for my PhD at Columbia University in 1967, my political science professors emphasized how the West and Japan had mistreated China, with the implication that my generation needed somehow to atone for this. Many of our textbooks contained similar arguments.
This perspective—the desire to help China at all costs, the almost willful blindness to any actions that undercut our views of Chinese goodwill and victimhood—has colored the U.S. government’s approach to dealing with China. It has affected the advice that China experts offer to U.S. presidents and other leaders.
It even has influenced our translations. One of the first things a student of the Chinese language learns is its essential ambiguity. There is no alphabet, and Chinese words aren’t formed by letters. Rather, words are formed by combining smaller words. The word for size combines the character for large with the character for small. The word for length combines the words for short and long. Chinese use dictionaries to organize thousands of characters, which must be filed under approximately two hundred so-called radicals or families, all sorted according to relatedness. Under each category of relatedness, the dozens of characters are again sorted in order of the total number of strokes required to write a character, from a minimum of one to a maximum of seventeen strokes.
Adding to this complexity are the tones and pitches that delineate words. The effect of tones is to give a single word four possible meanings. A classic example is ma. In the first tone, ma means mother. The second tone is a rising tone, so ma then means numb. The third tone for ma means horse, and the fourth tone for ma, which falls sharply, means to scold. The Chinese must talk loudly to make the tonal differences audible. Another ambiguity is how few sounds the Chinese language uses for syllables. The English language uses ten thousand different syllables, but Chinese has only four hundred. Thus, many words sound the same. Puns and misunderstandings abound.
The language’s very complexity is like a secret code. A foreigner has to make important decisions about how to translate Chinese concepts, which can inherently lead to misunderstandings.13 I had to decide how to translate unusual, elliptical Chinese phrases that were used by Deng Xiaoping in 1983 to a Senate delegation in Beijing, then ambiguous comments in 1987 by Zhu Rongji in Washington, then again in 2002 to decipher what Hu Jintao meant to convey during his visit to the Pentagon. My colleagues often share our translation decisions with each other. Unfortunately, the vast majority of so-called China experts in the United States do not speak Chinese beyond a few words—enough to feign competence in the presence of those who do not speak the language fluently. This fact makes it easier for the supposed China "experts" to interpret Chinese messages subjectively in ways that conform to their own beliefs. What we all must do better is to look not just at speeches but also at the context of those speeches, and we need to look for larger hidden meanings. For well over a half century, Americans have failed to do this. Until recently, the sometimes vaguely phrased expressions of the Chinese hawks were obscure references to ancient history, so their input to Chinese strategy was hidden from most foreigners.
Ever since President Richard Nixon’s opening to China in 1971, U.S. policy toward the People’s Republic has largely been governed by those seeking "constructive engagement" with China to aid its rise. This policy has remained in effect, with only marginal changes, for decades, across eight U.S. presidential administrations. Democratic and Republican presidents have had different foreign policy visions, but all agreed on the importance of engaging with China and facilitating its rise. The constructive engagement crowd, populated by prominent academics, diplomats, and former presidents, has held significant sway over policymakers and journalists covering China. I should know—I was a member of this group for many decades. In fact, I was among the first people to provide intelligence to the White House favoring an overture to China, in 1969. For decades, I played a sometimes prominent role in urging administrations of both parties to provide China with technological and military assistance. I largely accepted the assumptions shared by America’s top diplomats and scholars, which were inculcated repeatedly in American strategic discussions, commentary, and media analysis. We believed that American aid to a fragile China whose leaders thought like us would help China become a democratic and peaceful power without ambitions of regional or even global dominance. We underestimated the influence of China’s hawks.14
Every one of the assumptions behind that belief was wrong—dangerously so. The error of those assumptions is becoming clearer by the day, by what China does and, equally important, by what China does not do.
False Assumption #1: Engagement Brings Complete Cooperation
For four decades now, my colleagues and I believed that "engagement" with the Chinese would induce China to cooperate with the West on a wide range of policy problems. It hasn’t. Trade and technology were supposed to lead to a convergence of Chinese and Western views on questions of regional and global order. They haven’t. In short, China has failed to meet nearly all of our rosy expectations.15
From thwarting reconstruction efforts and economic development in war-ravaged Afghanistan to offering lifelines to embattled anti-Western governments in Sudan and North Korea, China has opposed the actions and goals of the U.S. government. Indeed, China is building its own relationships with America’s allies and enemies that contradict any peaceful or productive intentions of Beijing.
Take, for example, weapons of mass destruction. No security threat poses a greater danger to the United States and our allies than their proliferation. But China has been less than helpful—to put it mildly—in checking the nuclear ambitions of North Korea and Iran.
In the aftermath of 9/11, some commentators expressed the belief that America and China would henceforth be united by the threat of terrorism, much as they had once been drawn together by the specter of the Soviet Union. These high hopes of cooperating to confront the "common danger" of terrorism, as President George W. Bush described it in his January 2002 State of the Union address, by speaking of "erasing old rivalries,"16 did not change China’s attitude. Sino-American collaboration on this issue has turned out to be quite limited in scope and significance.
False Assumption #2: China Is on the Road to Democracy
China has certainly changed in the past thirty years, but its political system has not evolved in the ways that we advocates of engagement had hoped and predicted. A growing minority of China experts is beginning to appreciate this. Aaron Friedberg of Princeton University has observed that instead of being on the verge of extinction the Chinese Communist Party may survive for decades.17 The author James Mann, who has reported on China for more than thirty years, points out that what he terms the "soothing scenario," which predicts that China will somehow evolve smoothly into a liberal democracy, could prove to be a fantasy. Twenty or thirty years from now, he warns, China will likely be far richer and stronger than it is today, yet it may still be ruled by a Communist dictatorship that remains "hostile to dissent and organized political opposition," supportive of other oppressive regimes around the world, and sharply at odds with the United States.18 A 2009 assessment by the European Council on Foreign Relations, a leading center-left think tank, describes as "anachronistic" the belief that contact with the European Union will cause China to "liberalize its economy, improve the rule of law and democratize its politics."19 Rather than the emergence of an American-style free market economy, scholars are increasingly noting the emergence of a system termed "authoritarian capitalism."20 Andrew Nathan of Columbia University, writing in Journal of Democracy, calls the transformation "authoritarian resilience."21
Nonetheless, the idea that the seeds of democracy have been sown at the village level became the conventional wisdom among many China watchers in America. With patience but no pressure from the United States, the argument went, local elections in Chinese cities and towns would eventually be followed by regional and national elections.
Like many working in the U.S. government, I had heard the democracy story for decades. I read about it in countless books and articles. I believed in it. I wanted to believe in it.
My faith was first shaken in 1997, when I was among those encouraged to visit China to witness the emergence of "democratic" elections in a village near the industrial town of Dongguan. While visiting, I had a chance to talk in Mandarin with the candidates and see how the elections actually worked. The unwritten rules of the game soon became clear: the candidates were allowed no pubic assemblies, no television ads, and no campaign posters. They were not allowed to criticize any policy implemented by the Communist Party, nor were they free to criticize their opponents on any issue. There would be no American-style debates over taxes or spending or the country’s future. The only thing a candidate could do was to compare his personal qualities to those of his opponent. Violations of these rules were treated as crimes.
One candidate I spoke to asked me if this was how democratic elections worked in the West. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. China’s hawks had already done away with true elections.
False Assumption #3: China, the Fragile Flower
In 1996, I was part of a U.S. delegation to China that included Robert Ellsworth, the top foreign policy adviser to the Republican presidential nominee, Robert Dole. Shrewdly playing to the possibility that Dole might win the presidential election and tap Ellsworth as secretary of state, the Chinese offered us what appeared to be an unprecedented look at their country’s inner workings and problems. Some of our escorts were military officers who called themselves ying pai.
In what appeared to be a forthright exchange of views with Chinese scholars, we were told that China was in serious economic and political peril—and that the potential for collapse loomed large. These distinguished scholars pointed to China’s serious environmental problems, restless ethnic minorities, and incompetent and corrupt government leaders—as well as to those leaders’ inability to carry out necessary reforms. Considering the well-known secretiveness of the Chinese Politburo, I was astonished by these scholars’ candor and startled by their predictions, which only underscored my support for efforts to provide U.S. aid to a supposedly fragile China.
I later learned that the Chinese were escorting other groups of American academics, business leaders, and policy experts on these purportedly "exclusive" visits, where they too received an identical message about China’s coming decline. Many of them then repeated these "revelations" in articles, books, and commentaries back in the United States. For example, a study published by the influential RAND Corporation listed ten factors that would cause China’s slowdown or even collapse in the imminent future.22 This trend would continue to characterize the China debate for years afterward. The title of an article published in Commentary magazine in 2003 referred to China’s "sickness,"23 and a best-selling book published in 2001 referred to China’s "coming collapse."24 Many expressed the worrisome view that if the United States pressed China too hard to have elections, to free dissidents, to extend the rule of law, and to treat ethnic minorities fairly, then this pressure would lead to the collapse of the Chinese state—causing chaos throughout Asia.
For decades, we have seen such arguments in op-ed pieces, news stories, and books that have dominated our national discourse about China. Yet the hard fact is that China’s already robust GDP is predicted to continue to grow by at least 7 or 8 percent, thereby surpassing that of the United States by 2018 at the earliest, according to economists from the International Monetary Fund, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, and the United Nations.25 Unfortunately, China policy experts like me were so wedded to the idea of the "coming collapse of China"26 that few of us believed these forecasts. While we worried about China’s woes, its economy more than doubled.
False Assumption #4: China Wants to Be—and Is—Just Like Us
In our hubris, Americans love to believe that the aspiration of every other country is to be just like the United States. In recent years, this has governed our approach to Iraq and Afghanistan. We cling to the same mentality with China.
In the 1940s, an effort was funded by the U.S. government to understand the Chinese mind-set. This culminated in several studies, including one in which 150 Chinese emigrants in New York’s Chinatown were shown Rorschach inkblot cards. The researchers, who included the scholars Nathan Leites, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, also analyzed the themes of popular Chinese books and films. One conclusion that emerged was that the Chinese did not view strategy the same way Americans did. Whereas Americans tended to favor direct action, those of Chinese ethnic origin were found to favor the indirect over the direct, ambiguity and deception over clarity and transparency. Another conclusion was that Chinese literature and writings on strategy prized deception.27
Two decades later, Nathan Leites, who was renowned for his psychoanalytical cultural studies, observed:
Chinese literature on strategy from Sun Tzu through Mao Tse-tung has emphasized deception more than many military doctrines. Chinese deception is oriented mainly toward inducing the enemy to act inexpediently and less toward protecting the integrity of one’s own plans. In other cultures, particularly Western, deception is used primarily with the intention of ensuring that one’s own forces can realize their maximum striking potential . . . the prevalent payoff of deception for the Chinese is that one does not have to use one’s own forces. . . . Chinese tend to shroud their means in secrecy and not publicize the day-to-day activities of those in power; for surprise and deception are assumed to be vital.28
Chinese literature often highlights the role of deception, and the need for the "sage"—that is, the wise statesman—to penetrate the deception around him to find the hidden signals in reality. There is an emphasis in many classic Chinese stories of heroes using cunning to manipulate others. The heroes of many popular novels, films, and television programs are those who prove adept at concealing their motives, misleading enemies, and veiling their true intentions until the end. Those artists considered the most skilled convey deceptive signs that require a reader’s effort and intelligence to decipher and understand before the plot reaches a conclusion.29
The results of the original 1940s study—the idea that an ethno-national group viewed the world differently—proved controversial and politically incorrect, and they were never published. The sole existing copy rests quietly in the Library of Congress.30 It would not be until 2000 that I learned from Chinese generals that the study’s conclusions were essentially correct. The Chinese value highly the importance of deception stratagems. They are proud of their cultural uniqueness. Two hawkish generals formed a "Chinese Strategic Culture Promotion Society" to broadcast this view. Their national media influence has risen since I first met them twenty years ago. My colleagues mistakenly ignored them until some of their recommendations recently became Chinese policy.
False Assumption #5: China’s Hawks Are Weak
In the late 1990s, during the Clinton administration, I was tasked by the Department of Defense and the CIA to conduct an unprecedented examination of China’s capacity to deceive the United States and its actions to date along those lines. Relying on intelligence assets, unpublished documents, interviews with Chinese dissidents and scholars, and Chinese writings that I read in the original Mandarin script, I began to see the secrets that the Chinese had been hiding—in plain sight—from people like me.
As I assembled clues contradicting the conventional narrative about China that I had always believed, I starting connecting the pieces of an alternative narrative of roughly the past four decades. Over time, I discovered proposals by Chinese hawks (ying pai) to the Chinese leadership to mislead and manipulate American policymakers to obtain intelligence and military, technological, and economic assistance. I learned that these hawks had been advising Chinese leaders, beginning with Mao Zedong, to avenge a century of humiliation and aspired to replace the United States as the economic, military, and political leader of the world by the year 2049 (the one hundredth anniversary of the Communist Revolution). This plan became known as "the Hundred-Year Marathon." It is a plan that has been implemented by the Communist Party leadership from the beginning of its relationship with the United States. The goal is to avenge or "wipe clean" (xi xue) past foreign humiliations. Then China will set up a world order that will be fair to China, a world without American global supremacy, and revise the U.S.-dominated economic and geopolitical world order founded at Bretton Woods and San Francisco at the end of World War II. The hawks assess that China can only succeed in this project through deception, or at least by denial of any frightening plans.
When I presented my findings on the Chinese hawks’ recommendations about China’s ambitions and deception strategy, many U.S. intelligence analysts and officials greeted them initially with disbelief. They had not seen the evidence I found. (Thankfully, George Tenet, the director of Central Intelligence, was not among them, and in 2001 he awarded me the Exceptional Performance Award for this work.) I can understand my colleagues’ skepticism. The Chinese government had long portrayed itself as a backward nation in need of assistance for its "peaceful rise." The Chinese have denied any desire to exercise global leadership—or to clash with the United States. Indeed, written into the Constitution of the People’s Republic of China is language that prohibits the nation from becoming a hegemon.31 Chinese leaders routinely reassure other nations that "China will never become a hegemon."32 In other words, China will be the most powerful nation, but not dominate anyone or try to change anything. We don’t have a copy of the plan. Indeed, the Chinese say there is no plan. They merely want to restore China to its former global position of three hundred years ago, when it commanded roughly a third of the world economy. That apparently means becoming at least twice as strong as the United States by 2049, the hawks say.
These notions of the more peaceful and less nationalist China have been confirmed by ideological allies in the West who populate academia, think tanks, financial institutions, and government. Advancing the notion of a China that is more interested in economic growth than global dominion serves to advance their self-interest, whether it be a private equity fund manager making investments in Chinese companies or a think tank scholar whose funding, access, and ability to facilitate studies and conferences with her Chinese counterparts depends on advancing the rosy scenario. This predominant school of thought among our foreign policy experts, economists, and businessmen is well meaning and not without evidence. There exist in China moderates and those who genuinely seek cooperation with the United States. Indeed, Chinese government officials usually echo those views and are eager to promote them as the authentic voice of China.33
But the more benign view of China held by those derisively called "panda huggers"—a term I wore as a badge of honor for decades—also requires suppressing reams of countervailing evidence and dismissing the many hard-line nationalist voices within China, from the highest levels of politics and military institutions to the conventional wisdom of the masses, as "fringe" and "marginal." They are hard-liners labeled as "out of touch" and as relics of a past that has been obliterated by globalization and information technology.
Dismissing Chinese nationalism as out of the mainstream is what most Western experts on China have done for decades. The bias of wishful thinking has created a blind spot to what is likely to emerge as America’s thorniest national security challenge in the next twenty-five years. There are moderates and hard-liners in China, doves and hawks, who are locked in a fierce debate over the shape of China’s future within the halls of government in Beijing and in frequent conferences. But increasingly, the more hard-line and nationalist worldview is winning out and indeed has far more influence in the inner circle of China’s new president, Xi Jinping. The hawks’ government-sponsored newspaper Global Times has become the second or third most popular source of news, and its editor, Hu Xijin, makes clear how China’s hawks see the moderate doves: they are "the cancer cells that will lead to the demise of China."34
For the past three decades, as a China expert who has worked in the Congress and in the executive branch for every administration since Richard Nixon’s, I have arguably had more access to China’s military and intelligence establishment than any other Westerner. Representatives from the People’s Liberation Army and the Ministry of State Security have opened the doors to their most secretive institutions and given me documents and writings that no other Westerner has read. The hard-liners among them saw me as a useful tool to promote their views, even if I caused discomfort among those in Beijing and Washington who were invested in the image of a peaceful, docile China. In 1998 and 2000, I published two academic books called Chinese Views of Future Warfare35 and China Debates the Future Security Environment,36 which translated many of the documents I had collected on my visits to Beijing or that had been given to me by Chinese military leaders and defectors. I included documents from both sides of the internal Chinese debate about the nation’s role in the world, what I called the "orthodox" (hard-line) and "revisionist" (moderate) perspectives at the time. The generals and foreign policy experts I quoted in my two books expressed gratitude that their views had been translated accurately and were receiving some attention, at least among a small clique of national security experts in Washington, and proceeded to grant me more access in the years following.37
After decades of studying China closely, I am convinced that these hard-line views are not fringe, but are very much in the mainstream of Chinese geostrategic thought. They are the unvarnished views of senior policymakers who represent hundreds of millions who want to see China rise to global preeminence. Dating back to the beginnings of the Cultural Revolution, there is indisputably also a long line of liberal thinkers who seek integration within the global free market and evolution toward a more democratic system of governance. Just as America has its camps of hawks and doves, its so-called neoconservatives, interventionists, realists, and isolationists, Chinese elites are divided. The difference, of course, is that those debates rarely occur in view of the Chinese public and the Western press. There is no Congress of elected representatives or truly open forums to discuss such matters.
The challenge for Western policymakers, intelligence analysts, and scholars in the coming decade is to penetrate the cloak of secrecy in which these debates occur and to determine the level of influence these different camps have. Until now, it has largely been taken for granted among Western policy and business elites that China seeks a peaceful rise and will gradually evolve to more resemble America. The explosive growth in China of consumer brands such as Starbucks, McDonald’s, and Apple serves only to reinforce this view. Only recently have there been disturbing signs that a more militaristic China may be ascendant, which has caused some to question the wishful thinking that has prevailed for more than forty years.38
What is indisputable, even for those who continue to advocate for closer ties between the United States and China, is that not only has China’s rise happened right under our noses, but also the United States, and the West more broadly, have helped the Chinese accomplish their goals from the beginning. One key source of such assistance was the World Bank. Meeting with Chairman Deng Xiaoping in 1983, World Bank executives secretly agreed that a team of economists would study China intensively and, looking ahead twenty years, recommended how China could catch up to the United States.39 But this wasn’t the only means of assistance. For decades, the U.S. government has freely handed over sensitive information, technology, military know-how, intelligence, and expert advice to the Chinese. Indeed, so much has been provided for so long that Congress complained in 2005 that there is no full accounting. And what we haven’t given the Chinese, they’ve stolen.
The strength of the Hundred-Year Marathon, however, is that it operates through stealth. To borrow from the movie Fight Club, the first rule of the Marathon is that you do not talk about the Marathon. Indeed, there is almost certainly no single master plan locked away in a vault in Beijing that outlines the Marathon in detail. The Marathon is so well known to China’s leaders that there is no need to risk exposure by writing it down. But the Chinese are beginning to talk about the notion more openly—perhaps because they realize it may already be too late for America to keep pace.
I observed a shift in Chinese attitudes during three visits to the country in 2012, 2013, and 2014. As was my usual custom, I met with scholars at the country’s major think tanks, whom I’d come to know well over decades. I directly asked them about a "Chinese-led world order"—a term that only a few years earlier they would have dismissed, or at least would not have dared to say aloud. However, this time many said openly that the new order, or rejuvenation, is coming, even faster than anticipated. When the U.S. economy was battered during the global financial crisis of 2008, the Chinese believed America’s long-anticipated and unrecoverable decline was beginning.
I was told—by the same people who had long assured me of China’s interest in only a modest leadership role within an emerging multipolar world—that the Communist Party is realizing its long-term goal of restoring China to its "proper" place in the world. In effect, they were telling me that they had deceived me and the American government. With perhaps a hint of understated pride, they were revealing the most systematic, significant, and dangerous intelligence failure in American history. And because we have no idea the Marathon is even under way, America is losing.
Copyright © 2015 by Michael Pillsbury
Table of Contents
Author's Note XIIntroduction: Wishful Thinking 1
1. The China Dream 17
2. Warring States 31
3. Only China Could Go to Nixon 52
4. Mr. White and Ms. Green 80
5. America, the Great Satan 99
6. China's Message Police 115
7. The Assassin's Mace 134
8. The Capitalist Charade 156
9. A China World Order in 2049 177
10. Warning Shots 197
11. America as a Warring State 214
Notes 235
Acknowledgments 303
Index 307
Related Subjects
Customer Reviews
Explore More Items
