The Hundred-Year Marathon

November 15, 2014
A presentation of China's hidden agenda grounded in the author's longtime work at the U.S. Defense Department.Since his recruitment into lofty intelligence circles as a young China expert in 1969, Council on Foreign Relations member Pillsbury (China Debates the Future Security Environment, 2004, etc.) has been privy to the debriefings of various Soviet spies and Chinese dissidents who have clearly warned of China's aim to surpass America as world leader in time for the 100-year anniversary of the founding of the Communist People's Republic: 2049. Yet America has not listened. Once also a "Panda hugger," as he calls this group of "happy barbarians gleefully ignorant of the deeply subversive" aims of China, Pillsbury has changed his view, as he demonstrates in this systematic destruction of the well-accepted Western notion of China as a martyr and welfare state. A student of Mandarin, the author notes that the Chinese speak in a "secret code" difficult for outsiders to decipher. The assumptions of this "constructive engagement crowd," which developed from the Nixon-Kissinger entente of 1971, include the idea that "engagement brings cooperation" and that China is "on the road to democracy"-both false. The truth can be found in the statecraft primer Mao Zedong cherished close to him from the Long March until his death, The General Mirror for the Aid of Government, containing the stratagems favored by the Warring States period dating from 4000 B.C. These Darwinian lessons, readily grasped by the wave of hawks directing China policy since the 1990s, who gained the upper hand over the reformers, encompass all kinds of sneaky tactics-e.g., stealing your opponent's secrets. Perhaps most galling in Pillsbury's findings is the degree of demonization of the U.S. taught regularly in Chinese institutions, without any positive sense of American historical contributions to China's growth. Fodder for concerned thought, with a dollop of paranoia.

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