[This was my entry in the 2022 Astral Codex Ten book review contest, with a few small edits. It didn’t make the cut to get published on ACX, but I think it’s worth sharing anyway.]
Intro
How much longer can the U.S. expect to remain unchallenged in its leadership of the world? A question seldom on most of our minds, perhaps, but raised in a sudden and striking way by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The outbreak of war certainly caught me by surprise, and I know I’m far from alone in thinking it heralds the end of the U.S.-led international order that has prevailed since the end of the Cold War. As an American ’90s kid this is the only world I’ve known, and I grew up assuming America was the End of History, but as I’ve matured I’ve come to see that some people around the world just don’t buy into the American narrative of our heroic role on the world stage. Russia has of course voiced her own opposition to the spread of American power in Europe, but I’m still convinced that the more serious long-term threat to the current world order comes from China. I hope this book review will give some sense of why.
I read Michael Pillsbury’s 2015 book, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower, late last year, and while I learned a lot from it I didn’t think much about it after I’d finished. This book was written as a wake-up call to Americans who were unwilling to seriously consider China’s ambitions for the twenty-first century, but on this point I needed little convincing. It seemed obvious that the Chinese government would have plans to overtake the U.S. in terms of military might, economic capacity, and political influence.
That is not the story that diplomats like Pillsbury have been telling themselves, however. This book makes a compelling case that the American foreign-policy establishment has been too complacent in assisting the rise of its greatest geopolitical rival, and that as a result America’s position of power among the nations has become more precarious than most of Pillsbury’s ilk will admit. There is a good deal of evidence presented here that American authorities have underestimated China’s capabilities in recent decades, but far more important is how the U.S. has overestimated the degree of alignment between the values Western countries take for granted and those of the Chinese Communist Party.
Pillsbury attributes this international misunderstanding to Americans’ ignorance of Chinese history and culture, plus wishful thinking that the world wants to be just like America, as well as the complementary Chinese strategy of hiding in plain sight while gaining strength. This book lays out an argument that the Chinese have sought to keep their plans secret from the West, including by active deception, and that key players on the American side, not least Pillsbury himself, have been blinded to this deception by the incentive to preserve good relations at all times. The portrayal of China as a cunning underdog taking advantage of the dominant power’s hubris is well-crafted, but what makes this book shine is Pillsbury’s confession of the role he personally played in the strategic blunders of U.S.-China diplomacy since the Nixon administration. He has recanted his earlier position on China, but in this reviewer’s opinion his change of mind does not go far enough, as he fails to question his presupposition that American dominance of the entire world is the most desirable state of affairs. Pillsbury comes across as an American imperialist from the first, and his commitment to U.S. hegemony has not faltered; what has changed is his understanding of China’s willingness to cooperate with America’s imperial agenda, and his foreign-policy stances have shifted accordingly.
What does this have to do with the war in Ukraine? Well, I don’t think Zhao Lijian was joking when he said on April 1 of this year that “NATO should have become history when the Soviet Union disintegrated,” denouncing the Cold-War alliance as “the initiator and biggest promoter of the Ukraine crisis,” as reported by RT. Is the Russian invasion best understood as the blowback from decades of imperialistic overreach on the part of America and her allies? That’s not among the most immediate causal factors, but it’s definitely part of the story. It’s telling that this is what the Russians are telling themselves, and it’s troubling that Russian propaganda can get away with portraying China as sympathetic to their resistance against the expansive ambitions of NATO. Clearly, the U.S. has underestimated the degree to which former great powers like China and Russia resent their status in the current world order, and recent events in Eastern Europe show that – accurately or not – the U.S.-led West is seen as vulnerable. I was initially unsure what book I wanted to review for this contest, but news of the war in Ukraine motivated me to take a much more serious look at The Hundred-Year Marathon and Pillsbury’s claims that the U.S. is unprepared for a real challenge to its hegemony.
There seems to be a reckoning in store for the American empire, and while virtually nobody saw this coming, there were certainly hints that America’s status was not as secure as its leaders assumed. Pillsbury was in a position to notice that something was wrong with the story U.S. diplomats were telling about Sino-American relations, but he spent much of his career in denial, promoting American military and economic cooperation with China and viewing the increased interdependence of the two countries as key to building a safer, stabler world. He played a pivotal role in mainstreaming the narrative that American charity was necessary to support a weak China and would influence its development in line with Western values, so I’m not surprised it took a lot of evidence to change his mind. The momentum of his career trajectory must have made this about-face a difficult move.
About the Author
The Hundred-Year Marathon relies heavily on its author’s decades of personal experience in U.S.-China relations, and for the most part he comes across as credible. He doesn’t spare himself in his assessment of American ignorance, and his change of mind seems to have come about honestly over the course of his career. Pillsbury laments how gullible he was as a young diplomat and how many of his peers continue to follow the false narrative he found so seductive at the start of his dealings with the CCP, that China aspires to be nothing more than a reskinned United States and needs further help from the West to realize this dream. This book seems to have been largely motivated by a desire to summarize and share the experiences that led its author to see China as “a competitor, not a welfare case,” and it uses his personal story to great rhetorical effect.
Michael Pillsbury has been an influential figure in U.S.-China relations for decades, and his career began before the U.S. even recognized the People’s Republic of China as a legitimate state. Until Nixon, every president since the end of the Chinese Civil War in 1949 had affirmed that the rightful government of China belonged to the nationalists who had fled to Taiwan in the aftermath of the Communist victory, rejecting the possibility of diplomatic ties to “Red” China. This state of affairs lasted until the 1960s, when Washington began to sense that tensions were escalating between Beijing and Moscow.
American intelligence officials had heard about a growing Sino-Soviet split from one Soviet defector, but another had rejected rumors of such a split as misinformation. The intelligence community needed insiders’ perspectives to determine what the Soviets actually thought of their Chinese neighbors. Lacking sufficient higher-level sources of intel they turned in 1969 to a young Brzezinski protégé at the UN, Michael Pillsbury. He describes himself at the time with humble braggadocio as “a lowly graduate student who happened to be working at a Soviet-packed organization in New York, the UN Secretariat,” and, as “the only American assigned to any spot in the division,” he was “an obvious target for recruitment” by U.S. intelligence agencies that wanted information on what the Soviets were thinking.
Pillsbury heard from various Soviet bureaucrats at the UN that “Soviet leadership hated and feared the Chinese, believing that China was planning to take control of the Communist world and eventually assert global dominance,” but they had underestimated the threat for decades as the Chinese had “skillfully played the part of weaklings dependent on Soviet assistance,” with the implication that “the worst error the United States could make would be to provide military aid to China.” He goes on to confess his own willful ignorance in the face of these warnings, describing a particular Soviet source as “credible” but ultimately dismissing him:
He sounded to me like a boyfriend talking about his ex-girlfriend, warning that she’d break my heart like she broke his. … It seemed unrealistic that the Chinese would dare to dream about truly surpassing the United States. All official Washington heard was that China wanted a new dance partner. President Nixon would have to decide whether to cut in. Thus began a relationship with consequences far more profound than any of us at the time dared to consider.
This misstep seems all the more tragic given that Pillsbury himself had seen classified Soviet documents (secretly photographed by the CIA), which “revealed that Moscow’s military leaders already saw China as a military threat as dangerous as the NATO alliance.” The Soviets were not just feeding the U.S. a line. Pillsbury’s contacts at the UN tried to warn even their capitalist enemies that the Chinese were treacherous allies with global ambitions of their own, who would take advantage of America’s strength and largesse the same way they had fooled the Soviet Union. But the prospect of splitting up the Communist world proved too tempting, so on the advice of Michael Pillsbury and other “panda huggers,” the Nixon administration sought to make a powerful new ally out of a former foe.
This was the start of Michael Pillsbury’s career, and he went on to advocate closer Sino-American ties under every president from Richard Nixon to Bill Clinton. He played an important role in promoting the notion that American assistance in China’s development would bring about “a convergence of Chinese and Western views on questions of regional and global order,” which was the goal for which he worked most of his career. Motivated by the hope that American charity would prompt reciprocal goodwill from the Chinese, he and his fellow diplomats angled for alliance based on mutual opposition to the Soviet Union and made a number of offers to win China’s trust. Pillsbury himself, under the guidance of Fred Iklé, wrote a memo to Henry Kissinger expressing “support for tangible U.S. covert cooperation with China,” which ultimately inspired Kissinger to court China by “proposing the beginnings of a military supply relationship, both in peacetime and in the case of a Soviet invasion.”
As Pillsbury’s foreign-policy career advanced, cooperation between the US and China escalated through the Ford and Carter administrations, culminating in the deals struck under Ronald Reagan, “who treated China as a full strategic partner—albeit in secret.” Pillsbury notes, however, that Reagan’s willingness to strengthen China through our mutual cooperation came with stipulations, whereas the aid offered by his predecessors had come with far fewer strings attached. As he describes it, “U.S. assistance to China was conditioned on China staying independent of the Soviet Union and liberalizing its authoritarian system,” but Reagan’s advisers “largely ignored these preconditions, and for whatever reason so did he.” The United States worked with China against Soviet interests in southern Africa, where they armed anti-Cuban forces in the Angolan Civil War; in Cambodia, where they bolstered the Khmer Rouge against invasion from Vietnam; and most infamously in Afghanistan, where the U.S. sent over $2 billion in Chinese weapons to help Osama bin Laden and his buddies fight the Russians in Charlie Wilson’s War. This was the high point of Sino-American military cooperation, but the US government would continue to aid China economically, both directly and indirectly through organizations like the WTO. Pillsbury got himself in deep with this stuff, and it’s to his credit that he makes no attempt to exculpate himself from the U.S. government’s misreading of its relationship with China.
Pillsbury’s skepticism of China’s honesty and good intentions grew slowly, but the balance of evidence seems to have shifted for him sometime in the early 2000s. He recalls that in the 1980s and 1990s he was “a prominent advocate for military sales to China and considered a strong promoter of U.S.-China relations.” Back then he was “warmly welcomed” with “access to Chinese think tanks, scholars, military officials, government workers, and more,” but after expressing his concerns about China’s rise in a 2006 Wall Street Journal article, he found himself blacklisted by the CCP. His exclusive academic visa access was canceled; he now “needed official diplomatic notes from the U.S. government” to visit China, and his “interactions were monitored more carefully than before.” This was a blow to his information-gathering ability, but it quite probably earned him a certain form of ‘cred’ as a China expert:
It has long been known among China scholars that the people most trusted to report on China are those academics, journalists, and writers who have been denied visas into the country. The rest routinely make compromises, consciously or subconsciously, to maintain their access.
At this point in his dealings with China, Pillsbury had learned more than enough to support the radical change in his opinion, and in the ensuing years he evidently prepared to publish the accumulated lessons of his career in a popular book. This seems to have been a good move, and not just because he sold a lot of copies. As he tells it, it was his work on The Hundred-Year Marathon that accidentally brought him back into the good graces of the CCP, who seem to have committed a major blunder in underestimating the severity of Pillsbury’s break with his former positions.
It was in 2013 that, for seemingly no reason, the Chinese once again approved Pillsbury’s request for a scholar’s visa. He describes his surprise at being “invited to lunches and dinners by various People’s Liberation Army generals” and greeted by officials he hadn’t seen in years on his 2013 visit. He would learn a lot about China in 2013, but at first he was just confused. A Chinese defector friend of his suggested that it was because he had been working on his book and discussing it by email: “The Chinese apparently had gambled that if they were nice to me, and granted me more access, then maybe this book would be a little softer on them.” This book is, of course, Marathon, and it is not softer on them. Not even a little.
Pillsbury shows some huevos in turning the CCP’s attempted rehabilitation of their relationship with him against them. For one thing, he tells us just how transparently manipulative they were, so the Chinese come off worse than if they had just left the guy alone. More importantly, however, he takes advantage of their gestures of goodwill to gather more supporting evidence for the hawkish stance on China he advocates in his book. Instead of taking their welcoming attitude at face value, he had the good sense to question the narrative he was being fed, and he effectively leveraged the access he received to further undermine the credibility of the Chinese government.
The irony is that this all happened because the Chinese had learned about the book and tried to win back his favor so that he wouldn’t portray them too negatively. They were of course unable to sway him, as he’d been gathering evidence of China’s capacity to deceive the United States since the late 1990s, when certain Chinese military figures had told him of a plan laid under Mao Zedong for China to regain its “proper” place on the world stage by the mid-twenty-first century, a plan called the “Hundred-Year Marathon.” Pillsbury may have thought this plan far-fetched at first, but in the years leading up to the publication of his book, his Chinese contacts spoke with increasing candor and confidence about the inevitability of a “China-led world order,” which only heightened the urgent need he felt to share his warnings about China with a wider audience.
The greatest obstacle to most Americans’ understanding of China’s thinking is simply ignorance of Chinese history and culture, and in the book’s early chapters Pillsbury presents the historical context from which the modern Chinese mindset has developed. The history of China is long and complex, but Pillsbury highlights a few key periods, ancient and modern, that have most profoundly shaped China’s strategic thinking. Some of the lessons drawn from this history seem like common sense, but others reveal important differences in the presuppositions that Chinese and Western minds bring to bear on strategy and tactics.
(Americans) Don’t Know Much About (Chinese) History
The title of this book, The Hundred-Year Marathon, refers to a plan by the Chinese government to achieve geopolitical preeminence, surpassing the United States in particular, by 2049, the hundredth anniversary of the Communist victory in mainland China. There is a definite conspiratorial note here that is reflected in Pillsbury’s rhetoric throughout the book, but in this case accusations of conspiracy seem reasonable. First off, Pillsbury cites as his source for the phrase “Hundred-Year Marathon” the 2009 book, The China Dream, in which Colonel Liu Mingfu says admiringly of Mao Zedong that “he dared to craft a grand plan to surpass America, stating that beating the United States would be China’s greatest contribution to humanity.” That’s a bold claim to make about the nation that gave the world gunpowder, wood-pulp paper, and soy sauce, but it’s only reasonable that the government of China would have lofty long-term ambitions, given the country’s history.
The Chinese are a proud people, attuned to their rich history, who feel they are well below their rightful place among the nations. As Pillsbury mentions when discussing his 2013 visit to the Chinese National Museum, China sees itself as “a great nation whose people are industrious, courageous, intelligent, and peace-loving and have made indelible contributions to human civilization.” This of course could have been said by any American president about the United States (or even by the archvillain Putin in reference to Russia!) but the universal applicability of this garden-variety national pride sheds an interesting light on the asymmetry in power between the U.S. and other countries. The Chinese would contend they have as much right as anyone to the position of global leadership currently held by the United States, maybe even more so than an upstart nation that’s not even half a millennium old.
China, in one form or another, has consistently been one of the great powers of world history since before the Roman Empire, and Chinese culture has a long memory. “When an American is asked to date a historical event,” Henry Kissinger has written, “he refers to a specific day on the calendar; when a Chinese describes an event, he places it within a dynasty.” The history of China, stretching back to the dawn of East Asian civilization, records fourteen imperial dynasties, of which “ten have each lasted longer than the entire history of the United States.” This sense of historical depth contributes to the Chinese understanding that meaningful victories are not won quickly or easily and may be preceded by serious defeats. Despite its relative weakness throughout most of U.S. history, China at this point seems better positioned than the United States to execute long-term plans in its own national interest.
Pillsbury contrasts the U.S. where “businesses live by quarterly reports,” “politicians operate on short election cycles, and successful stock market strategies may be based on trading conducted in a single day,” with China where leaders “make plans that span generations” and “set goals that will not be achieved for a half century or more.” It may strike some as stereotypy, but it seems that China’s collectivist culture gives them an advantage over individualistic societies like the U.S. by making it easier for the development of society to be directed from the top down by people practiced in long-term thinking for the good of the nation. Unlike American politicians whose careers are made by condescending to the whims of a fickle public, Chinese leaders look up for guidance – to the CCP with its long-term dreams of national greatness – and by this red star steer a much more determined course to their desired future. Liberal democracy sure is a lot of fun, but authoritarianism has its perks as well, one of which is a heightened historical consciousness in its leaders, a stronger sense that the past and the future are just as real as the present election cycle.
Classical Education
Chinese history and literature feature prominently in The Hundred-Year Marathon, which argues that Americans’ ignorance on these matters is a decisive disadvantage when trying to understand the strategic thinking of the CCP. One of the book’s central arguments is that the strategies of conflict demonstrated throughout Chinese history are taken for granted in China and inform Chinese strategic thinking today, even as Americans may still find them alien. Writing for a Western audience, Pillsbury is at pains to show how decisions made by China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are most naturally understood in the context of ancient Chinese history, and his attempt to bridge the cultural divide between China and the Anglophone West in this respect is admirable.
The earliest period Pillsbury highlights as formative of Chinese thinking on military strategy is the Spring and Autumn period, which was characterized by political uncertainty and continual struggles for power, including among the legendary five hegemons. This period laid the foundation for China’s understanding of the means hegemonic powers employ to maintain their status as well as the ways a challenger can seek to take power. Pillsbury uses a story from The Spring and Autumn Annals to illustrate the Chinese attitude that a rising power must keep its ambitions secret from greater powers until the opportune moment. In the story, a challenger’s wish to overthrow the emperor is revealed when he asks how much the imperial cauldrons weigh, evidently already planning to move the cauldrons upon seizing the throne. The relevant proverb, well known in China, reads, “never ask the weight of the Emperor’s cauldrons,” meaning don’t give a stronger rival any hints that you seek to challenge him until you’re confident you can win.
Another story from the end of this period that Pillsbury heard from a Chinese defector in 2003 concerns the hegemon Fuchai and the challenger Goujian. As Pillsbury recounts, Fuchai captures Goujian but ignores the advice of his “hawkish” adviser Wu Zixu to kill his prisoner. Instead, Fuchai allows his rival to “serve as his personal servant for three years in exchange for his freedom, after which Goujian promises to be a strategic partner of the hegemon.” When Goujian regains his freedom, however, he “vows revenge for the humiliation he has suffered” and ultimately “invades the kingdom and captures Fuchai” to claim hegemony as his own. Pillsbury attributes Fuchai’s blunder to “other advisers, working secretly with the captured Goujian,” who “systematically defame and undermine Wu Zixu” until the hegemon puts his hawkish adviser to death.
This story exemplifies the importance of patience and stealth in overthrowing an entrenched power, and Pillsbury is clear about its application to modern geopolitics. He sees America “playing the role of Fuchai, a ruling king being persuaded by duplicitous or foolish advisers to ignore warnings about its rival’s true intentions,” while China is behaving like Goujian, “promising partnership and loyalty to the West until the time is right.” This is a recurring theme throughout Chinese history, and later periods of division and conflict furnish plenty of examples.
Pillsbury discusses the Warring States period extensively, arguing that the texts and events of this period provide the primary frame through which China sees its relationship with the U.S. and other nations. Before the consolidation of the first Chinese empire, a number of different rulers battled for the title of hegemon (Pillsbury often uses the Chinese word ba), and the records of these conflicts continue to exert a strong influence on China’s military leaders. Pillsbury makes multiple references to the Chinese text Stratagems of the Warring States, which seems to have no available English translation despite being “highly popular and closely studied in China,” where it is taught in schools and “considered a manual for statecraft.” He laments the lack of familiarity with this text in the West and feels that his foriegn-policy colleagues have missed a great deal of subtext by failing to recognize Chinese leaders’ references to Stratagems and other works of Warring States literature.
The Chinese term for strategist has its origins in the Warring States period. It means something like “horizontal-vertical-expert,” because the various kingdoms of the period were roughly organized into a north-south “vertical alliance” and an east-west “horizontal alliance.” Pillsbury’s description of the victory that ended this period is instructive: “Finally, the horizontal alliance soothed its rivals by denying any ambition to replace them and appealing to their short-term interests. Deception successfully broke apart the opposing coalition, and Qin, its strongest member, conquered the vertical alliance.” This type of deception was common in the Warring States period, during which “the worst thing a rising leader could do was to provoke confrontation with his more powerful rival before the point of maximum opportunity.” Pillsbury credits Stratagems with the lesson that “some of the wisest rising challengers even persuaded the old emperor to unwittingly assist in the challenger’s ascendance” and sees the same dynamics at work in the U.S.-China relationship he helped to promote. His claim is clear that China has taken inspiration from the Warring States and presented Americans with a deceptive narrative about its ambitions in order to cultivate a false sense of security and secure further assistance from the U.S. government.
Pillsbury’s discussion of this period’s influence on modern China benefits greatly from his diplomatic access and his knowledge of Chinese. He differentiates himself from scholars who “have asserted in a general way that China’s ancient past influences its present, but that it does so only metaphorically,” arguing that such mainstream scholars could not see the true relevance of the Warring states period because they “lacked access to internal Chinese government planning documents” and “Chinese defectors who previously held high positions inside the Chinese government.” Pillsbury cites “restricted essays by China’s top generals and strategists” as the source of his conclusion that “the Warring States mind-set has long been dominant among China’s leaders.” He recalls noticing on a visit to a military bookstore in 2013 that “there were clearly more lessons from ancient Chinese history than ever before,” indicating that the events of this period are as relevant as ever in China’s cultural memory. Upon asking about further historical lessons he might find in “the newly designated part of the bookstore where the sign said ‘Chinese military officers only,’” he was told by an officer that certain books were “not for foreigners to see because their lessons are too specific.”
America could stand to take a lesson or two from Chinese history, however, and one of Pillsbury’s motivations for writing The Hundred-Year Marathon is his hope that “the United States can adapt a few Chinese concepts from the Warring States era to beat China at its own game.” He is ultimately optimistic about how the United States can use its advantages to stay on top, as long as the U.S. government is not fooled by the messages China presents to the West. To underscore the continued relevance of Warring-States-style strategic deception, the book presents a few more exemplary power struggles that date to a few centuries later and have been immortalized in one of China’s greatest literary works.
The Three Kingdoms period was another inter-dynastic period characterized by conflict, and it provides the setting for the Ming dynasty novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms, China’s most influential work of fiction. Several stories from this novel are retold in Marathon, all involving conflict between a ruling hegemon and a challenger seeking to outwit and supplant him. The Three Kingdoms period is introduced by discussing the famous Battle of Red Cliffs, in which Cao Cao, the hegemon with clear military superiority, was deceived multiple times and utterly defeated by the superior strategy of Zhuge Liang. The schemes that these two employ against each other involve multiple layers of deceit that are too complex to discuss here, but Pillsbury sums up the situation nicely: “The long series of deceptions had destroyed Cao Cao, who had commanded the largest military force in China.” Again the theme of an up-and-coming power using clever stratagems to defeat a superior military force is emphasized, and, as Cao Cao “best exemplifies the concept of a ba [hegemon] in ancient Chinese literature,” this historical character is most closely analogous to the way the Chinese view the United States.
At their first meeting in 1975, Deng Xiaoping told Gerald Ford a story in which the challenger Liu Bei is defeated by Cao Cao and offers his services to the hegemon. Deng quoted Cao Cao’s famous expression of distrust at this offer: “Liu Bei is like an eagle, which when it is hungry will work for you, but when it is well fed will fly away.” The Americans understood that Cao Cao represented the United States in this situation, and Deng’s quote about Liu Bei was meant in reference to the Soviet Union, but PIllsbury contends that there were shades of meaning in this story that he and his colleagues failed to see: “What the Americans missed from that anecdote was that the same strategic sentiment held true for China. Once America built China into an equal, China would not remain an ally but would ‘fly away.’” This seems like common sense, that China wouldn’t be content to play second fiddle to the U.S. forever, and the failure to recognize this speaks more to the willful ignorance of the American foreign-policy establishment than anything particularly crafty from the Chinese president.
The other meaning Pillsbury sees in Deng’s quote, however, is much more cryptic because “Deng tactfully decided not to tell the most famous story” about these two characters, in which Cao Cao invites Liu Bei to meet with him for drinks. At this time the hegemon was at the height of his powers, and while Liu Bei dreamed of overthrowing him, he “had to keep his secret agenda from the attentive and intelligent Cao Cao.” Liu Bei successfully plays the fool and leaves Cao Cao none the wiser despite the more powerful man’s clever attempts to ferret out his true intentions. He later tells his allies how he managed “to convince Cao Cao of my perfect simplicity and the absence of any ambition,” allowing him to escape suspicion and continue plotting against the hegemon: “Liu Bei soon gained his independence from Cao Cao and spent the rest of his long life fighting against him for dominance.” If the Chinese see themselves as Liu Bei to America’s Cao Cao, this anecdote from their great literary classic suggests that the U.S. should expect deceptive behavior from China as the rising nation bides its time and builds its capabilities.
“There was no sign,” Pillsbury laments, “that either Ford or Kissinger had any idea what Deng was talking about” with his eagle and whatnot. Of course, Deng’s reference to Liu Bei’s disloyalty, taken in isolation, need not imply anything in particular, but in the context of China’s long military history this is seen to be one iteration of a recurring theme: rising powers must keep their ambitions secret so as not to be perceived as a threat to the ruling power, until they are strong enough to take power for themselves. It’s only reasonable to assume that Chinese history and literature have deeply informed the Chinese view of power and their approach to present-day geopolitics, and if Americans stay ignorant of these cultural touchstones, then so much the worse for American hegemony.
Ba: humbug?
—Whew! That was a lot of history with which Pillsbury expects his largely American readership to be unfamiliar. But these stories are significant parts of the historical context in which China views itself and the world at large. The Chinese see the United States as a hegemon akin to the aforementioned historical examples, which guide their expectations of how Washington will act to maintain its power. This book uses “hegemon” virtually interchangeably with the Chinese word ba, but as Pillsbury explains, its true meaning is something closer to “tyrant.”
Ba has a specific historical meaning from China’s Warring States period, where the ba provided military order to the known world and used force to wipe out its rivals, until the ba itself was brought down by force. … They rose and fell, as each new national challenger outfoxed the old ba in a contest of wits lasting decades or even a hundred years.
Thus, when Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai told Henry Kissinger in 1971, “America is the ba,” Kissinger’s ignorance of the Chinese language caused him to miss an important nuance in this simple statement. What Kissinger heard from his translator was, “America is the leader,” which “seemed to be an innocuous remark, and when taken in the context of the Cold War even a compliment.” Pillsbury sees in retrospect that “the Chinese saw Americans not as leaders, but as wrongdoers and tyrants,” but this revelation came far too late to change much, and he bemoans that he and his colleagues “still have to sort out and live with the consequences of that key mistranslation.”
Understanding on the American side had at least improved by 2002, when the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission wrote that “China’s leaders consistently characterize the United States as a ‘hegemon,’ connoting a powerful protagonist and overbearing bully that is China’s major competitor.” The commission also notes ominously that “China has traditionally characterized as hegemons only foreign powers with which it has highly antagonistic relationships.” Why would China see its relationship with the U.S. as “highly antagonistic” after all the American government has done for China’s military and economic development? China itself is accustomed to playing the role of ba, at least in its own sphere of influence, and the nation views the last two centuries as a particularly low period in its history. But history, it seems, is not over yet.
Humiliation and Hegemony
The term “century of humiliation” denotes the period from 1839 to 1949, beginning with the Chinese defeat in the First Opium War and ending with the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. As the Chinese see it, they have long been taken advantage of by the United States, and their narrative of the U.S. as an imperialistic aggressor aimed at world domination certainly hits different these days. This time period did see the United States expand its territory westward through seizures of land as well as win two world wars, leaving it in a position of unprecedented global dominance, but Pillsbury insists that Americans have only the best of intentions. With the shamelessness of a true patriot, he describes the Chinese “alternative history” that sees in the U.S. “something approximating an evil twin of its actual self, continually working to undermine the Chinese people, even as, in reality, Americans worked to strengthen China.” It may be a matter of some debate, what it means to “undermine” a people or “strengthen” a nation, but in any case the Chinese feel that they’ve had a tough break in recent history, and as is only human they blame their misfortune on whoever’s in charge.
The Chinese tale of American villainy in East Asia begins in 1844 with John Tyler and the Treaty of Wanghia. Like most of you, I’d never heard of this particular treaty, but Chairman Mao called it “the first unequal treaty signed as a result of U.S. aggression against China” and it is recorded in Chinese textbooks as having been imposed by the United States for the sake of “illegal actions to exploit China.” This might be an uncharitable framing on the part of the Chinese, but frankly American history is chock-full of illegal actions to exploit other countries. Moreover, all I knew about John Tyler (besides that he ran with “Tippecanoe”) was that he annexed Texas from Mexico, so imperialistic ambitions aren’t exactly out-of-character for the guy.
And as the Chinese tell it, it didn’t take long before the American agenda of hegemonic domination was taken up by Abraham Lincoln, to them “just another brutal, thuggish American imperialist” who wanted “China to be dominated, or even exploited within the international community.” A far cry, perhaps, from the towering Yankee messiah enshrined in the national mythos of the United States, Honest Abe allegedly had conquest on his mind when he appointed Anson Burlingame as U.S. minister to China. The 1868 Burlingame Treaty in this light appears aimed at pressuring China to comply with Western cultural norms: “It broke down native rituals and China’s system of etiquette in favor of Western diplomatic traditions and made possible Lincoln’s dream of American control of the Pacific.” It is unclear where the Chinese got this notion of “Lincoln’s dream,” as Lincoln seems to have had his hands full with maintaining American control of America, but in the wake of the Perry Expedition it was not hard to guess at the broader ambitions of the United States. To paraphrase a paraphrase of a paraphrase, the Chinese assume Lincoln was seeking “the conquest of China by Massachusetts.”
Pillsbury of course has a different take on these treaties, calling Wanghia “a pro-China compact” and Burlingame “advantageous to the Chinese,” but from the perspective of history neither the American nor the Chinese interpretation is more valid than the other. Of course this American diplomat isn’t going to countenance the view that American diplomacy since the nineteenth century has been imperialistic in its approach to China and the rest of the world, but if the Chinese feel otherwise then America has no grounds to deny their experience of their own recent history. Even if the U.S. struck deals that were to China’s material benefit, it’s reasonable to suppose that by bringing themselves into closer relationships with China and other countries, the Americans were at some level gunning for a Cultural Victory. There is zero discussion of whether American cultural influence has been to China’s benefit, since Pillsbury seems to assume that the U.S. is unquestionably a force for good in the world, and this is one of The Hundred-Year Marathon’s most serious flaws.
When it comes to the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, however, Pillsbury hardly even tries to save face, describing the Chinese perspective thus:
America joined an eight-nation expeditionary force that defeated the patriotic rebels who were fighting to free China from Western dominance. The foreign army raped and pillaged its way across China, and then the victors imposed $61 billion dollars in reparations (in today’s dollars) on the Chinese people.
As rebuttal, all this book can muster is the footnoteless assertion that during the Boxer Rebellion “the United States was a leader in restraining the abuses of foreign soldiers.” Sure it was.
The Chinese account of World War I is another story of betrayal by the West. China fought on the side of the Allies and expected to share in the spoils of victory, so they took it as a tremendous insult when the captured German colony of Shandong (Qingdao) was handed over to the Japanese. The Chinese felt they were lawfully entitled to the territory and resented Woodrow Wilson for failing to secure them this prize. Disregarding Hanlon’s razor altogether this view of history paints Wilson as a bad actor whose “dream of liberty and global military cooperation to secure peace was a clever ruse to fool the world into sanctioning America’s hegemonic aggression.” A different interpretation of this might be that only America and her client states share this “dream of liberty and global military cooperation” and the attempt to enforce this cosmopolitan vision on the world is simply another form of American cultural imperialism. Pillsbury cites an influential Chinese textbook, Deng Shusheng’s American History and the Americans as stating that Wilson sought to “make all of China a sphere of influence of the United States.” It certainly seems that the ambition of folks like Woodrow “kept us out of war” Wilson was in fact to convert the entire globe into an American sphere of influence (or do you think the world turned out this way by accident?). The Chinese are not wrong in broad strokes, but they exaggerate the extent to which America’s hegemonic ambitions have focused on their country in particular.
This can be seen much more clearly in how China tells itself the story of WWII. Apparently the Japanese campaigns of aggression against China in the 1930s were “part of the U.S. strategy to pit the two Asian nations against each other in an endless war that would prevent either from rising to threaten American hegemony in the western Pacific.” This claim is a lot more pointed and a lot less defensible than claims that America has historically sought to expand its sphere of influence and spread its culture abroad, but its truth value is in some sense irrelevant, as this is the story the Chinese tell themselves. This is the behavior expected of a hegemon. This whole alt-history narrative shows the kind of country China understands the United States to be, and the Chinese illustrate their tale of American world domination with the indisputable fact of America’s dominance in the world today. The outcome of WWII was obviously beneficial to the United States, and, being an American myself, I grew up with a vague understanding of the two World Wars as the great milestones of our ascent to superpower status. Did Washington leverage the international crises of the twentieth century to seize power on the world stage? Of course that’s what happened, but the Chinese err in assuming that the U.S. did anything to orchestrate these events, rather than simply being in the right place at the right time to pick up the pieces.
Likewise, the Chinese impute to the U.S. a great deal more agency and foresight than it actually had in the Cold War. Pillsbury describes how the fall of the Soviet Union “shook Beijing” and “served to underscore the Chinese leaders’ anti-American paranoia.” The Chinese concept of wu wei or “action by inaction” seemed to apply nicely to the way America was able to defeat the Soviet Union simply by outlasting it and ascending to the global throne once “the Communist system could no longer sustain itself.” China saw this cold victory as “a masterful display of statecraft and deception that exploited Soviet mistakes” and resolved not to “be similarly duped as the United States employs the same strategy against China.”
Pillsbury explicitly compares the Cold War with the Warring States period, writing that while China had long feared encirclement by the Soviet Union and its allies, “China’s strategy to break the Soviet encirclement with help from its fellow Warring State was succeeding.” With the Soviet threat neutralized, Pillsbury assumed the U.S. and China could “build on this foundation of trust and become true allies forever,” but he realizes now that that was just as naive as it sounds. With the benefit of hindsight, he notes that “according to the Warring States’ axioms, now would be the time for China to get back to dealing with the real hegemon, the United States.” The two countries had been convenient allies while the Soviet Union threatened both of them, but as America knocked off its last rival for the status of global ba, China saw that its greatest threat was now assimilation into the American world empire.
This Chinese spin on the entire history of Sino-American relations demonstrates nicely the incentive China has to frame itself as a victim rather than a beneficiary of the powers that be. It is a narrative that leverages America’s image of itself as the guarantor of weaker nations’ welfare as well as Americans’ reluctance to think of the American global empire as such. If the United States has been an ally to China this whole time and instrumental in helping it rise to its current station, then Americans should expect to have earned China’s gratitude; however, if U.S. diplomacy in China has been simply one arc of America’s long quest for world domination, then the Chinese are entitled to demand concessions from Americans and rebuke them for their imperialistic history.
With the U.S. now indisputably on top of the world order, China has reason to consider that maybe this was what the Americans wanted all along, and in this light America’s ostensibly benevolent overtures to China are more readily interpreted as soft power grabs. What’s more, if the United States has worked so hard to achieve its position, maybe China should be gunning for that top spot too. Insofar as the values of the Chinese differ from the Western paradigm that currently dominates, we should expect them to mount at least some opposition to the consolidation of the current world order and, crucially, to prioritize the secrecy of this opposition until the moment is right.
A Shift in Shi
The end of the Cold War brought about a major change in the national security situation for both the United States and China, and Pillsbury argues that China showed greater flexibility than the U.S. in adapting to the new geopolitical situation. He credits this in part to the Chinese concept of shi, which he singles out as particularly difficult to translate from Chinese, offering glosses like “alignment of forces,” “propensity of things to happen,” “shaping” or “eventuating” a situation, “creation of opportunity,” “unfolding” and “nudging”. He feels the concept imbued with “an almost mystical fatalism” about the power of human agency: “Humans and nations can interact with each other and change events, but those events have an independent momentum all their own.” He quotes Henry Kissinger’s book On China which calls shi “the art of understanding matters in flux” (italics Pillsbury’s). Proper understanding of shi involves open-mindedness and a feel for the contingencies of any situation, a willingness to update one’s beliefs and plans based on the developments of each moment. (The book doesn’t mention it, but a more scientifically inclined reader might profitably think of shi as the “self-organized criticality” of things.) The versatility of this concept is further evidenced by its appearance in compound vocabulary terms with meanings like “to shape a situation,” “to build up military posture,” “to assess the overall strategic political situation,” or “to seek a balance of power.”
Central to this concept is the notion that swift reversal of fortune is always possible as shi shifts from one state of affairs to another. While shi had once favored a Sino-Soviet alliance when the communist experiment looked promising, as the Cold War dragged on through the sixties, “Mao was able to assess correctly the shi that was driving China out of the Soviet orbit and toward a new alliance with the West.” In a similar way when the Cold War ended, China took stock of shi in order to reposition itself relative to the United States.
Pillsbury recounts learning about this Chinese reassessment of Sino-American relations in the early 1990s from a Chinese defector who told him Chinese “youth and intellectuals fell in love with America” during the period of close cooperation between the two countries but that such widespread admiration for American values in China “must never happen again.” With their long cultural memory, the Chinese government continued aspiring to a hegemony of its own and seeking “an end to humiliation at the hands of the West.” When this defector used the phrase “two birds with one stone,” Pillsbury pressed him on his meaning, to which the man responded, “There is no more Soviet threat … so Beijing doesn’t need America to protect us anymore,” with the implication that the other bird was the United States. Pillsbury recollects that he used the word ba and said outright, “Shi has shifted.”
It is virtually impossible to overstate the importance Pillsbury assigns to this term, as he references it throughout his book and claims that “the lack of recognition of the potential exploitation of shi … is dooming American strategy toward China.” This failure of American foreign policy to take advantage of shi is exemplified by the U.S. government’s refusal to change tactics in response to the Tiananmen Square protests and massacre.
8964 Reasons Why
The Chinese casting of America as the world-bestriding archvillain of modern history is relatively recent, with its origins in the Chinese government’s response to the pro-democracy demonstrations of 1989. Pillsbury records that “America was portrayed in a largely positive light in Chinese popular culture and state media” following Mao’s invitation to Nixon, and that today “the United States still inspires fascination” among Chinese moderates, but the hawks in the Chinese military take a hard anti-American stance because they believe the American ideal of democracy has been a pernicious influence on China’s people. Pillsbury would likely agree about the direction of U.S. influence on China if not its magnitude, but again he never seems to doubt for a second that this pull towards democracy is one of the many blessings American hegemony grants to a fortunate world, rather than a subtle form of cultural imperialism.
Pillsbury shared the widespread optimism about the emergence of a democratic spirit among the Chinese people when he visited Beijing in April 1989 “to check out the reports of student demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.” Hopes were high that these events would “accelerate the reform process that we believed was well under way in Beijing, a prodemocratic and procapitalistic tilt that those of us following China in the United States believed was all but irreversible.” This may seem foolish in hindsight, but to Pillsbury and the establishment at large it just made sense at the time. Top-tier diplomats like Winston Lord gave the US government every reassurance “that democratic elections had begun in Chinese villages and would soon spread” and that “the Chinese leadership was no threat to American interests … nor were the students in Tiananmen seeking democratic governance.” President Bush himself, after visiting Beijing that February, had told Congress that “the winds of democracy are creating new hope and the power of free markets is unleashing a new force.” What’s more, with the Soviet Union clearly on the wane at this point, Americans’ hopes were high that their country’s success would serve as an example for developing countries around the world.
Pillsbury characterizes the Tiananmen protesters’ demands as the classic American ideals of “free speech, a free press, less corruption, and more government accountability” and highlights their distinctly pro-American attitude: “They held up copies of the Declaration of Independence and built a ‘Goddess of Democracy’ that was three stories tall.” If things had gone differently, these events might have heralded the advent of a true Chinese democracy, and indeed for a time “the mainstream view in China and the West was that the hawks would not prevail and that force would never be used against the students.” Unfortunately, the mainstream view was wrong. Dead wrong.
The Hundred-Year Marathon credits Colonel Larry Wortzel for accurately predicting that the demonstrations would end in bloodshed. Wortzel, like Pillsbury, had been working closely with the hawkish wing of the Chinese government, and he credited the ying pai for this advance information. While this instance clearly “showed the hawks sometimes knew the minds of the leaders better than did the moderates,” it is regrettable that the American foreign-policy establishment did not shift its stance on China in response to this use of force. The inertia of American foreign policy was directed towards strengthening U.S.-China ties, and with this end in mind diplomats and politicians made efforts to preserve China’s image as an eager ally whose ambitions were not at odds with those of the United States.
The massacre in Tiananmen Square should have been a wake-up call to the United States that China was not totally on board with America’s vision for the post-Cold-War world, but “changes to existing U.S. policy toward China came slowly.” George H. W. Bush in particular had a personal interest in friendly diplomacy with China thanks to his experience as an envoy to China under Gerald Ford, and Marathon singles him out as trying all too hard not to step on Chinese toes during his presidency. President Bush continued to affirm his anticipation of Chinese democracy, stating, “I am convinced that the forces of democracy are going to overcome these unfortunate events in Tiananmen Square,” and Pillsbury cites a comment in Bush’s diary that Richard Nixon had advised him not to disrupt U.S.-China diplomacy “because we must have a good relationship in the long run.” The U.S. still saw China as an ally against the Soviets, and nobody in foreign-policy circles seriously considered the possibility “that China could deceive the United States or be the cause of a major intelligence failure.” Pillsbury also takes on a portion of the blame himself, confessing that he was “among those involved in perpetuating the delusion … that China was still on the road to democracy,” and admitting, “it is painful that I was so gullible.”
While the United States stuck to the status quo in the wake of Tiananmen, the CCP saw in the student demonstrations an unhealthy degree of American influence on China’s young people. The Chinese government set about rewriting the history of Sino-American relations to frame the U.S. as a monstrous hegemon bent on world domination from day one. Pillsbury portrays this as a cynical move by China to slander its most powerful rival and poison the well against the manifestly superior American ideals toward which the Chinese people had begun to strive. He claims that “the protests at Tiananmen Square were the product of a Chinese student movement seeking a better China, not an American front seeking China’s ruin,” and there’s no reason to doubt him unless one thinks that’s just the kind of thing the United States would do, is all I’ll say about that.
It’s plausible, however, that the Tiananmen protesters’ affection for American values and symbols along with the end of the Cold War prompted the CCP to reassess its understanding of America’s true ambitions throughout history and conclude that American global hegemony was imminent unless actively resisted. Perhaps the Chinese figured America had as its goal the unification of the world under a U.S.-led diplomatic order, because that’s exactly how things ended up. It’s been said that “nobody stumbles onto the throne,” and while this is no Chinese proverb (since I just made it up), the Chinese government seems to see the insight behind it, that the hegemonic power gained by the U.S. government over the last century is evidence of a desire in Washington to gain hegemonic power.
The Clinton Coup
America’s mild response to the killings in Tiananmen Square was motivated largely by a desire to maintain harmonious relations, and it was clear to many people that this was a mistake. When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1992 he condemned Bush as an “apologist” for China and promised “to take a more hard-nosed approach.” The Clinton administration initially was much more serious than its predecessors about “encouraging the forces of economic and political liberalization” in order to “facilitate a broad, peaceful evolution in China from communism to democracy.” Clinton cozied up to figures like the Dalai Lama and in his first year in office “invited to the White House forty Chinese dissidents,” a move that “was seen by the Chinese Politburo as an unprecedented rebuke,” motivating China to mount a campaign of influence among the president’s advisers. Pillsbury names names here, including Tony Lake, Robert Rubin, and Lawrence Summers, and he asserts that the Chinese worked strategically “to bolster these individuals, to facilitate contact between them and China’s allies in the business community, and to promote China’s interests in Washington.” Within the year, the Chinese had pulled off the so-called “Clinton coup,” shifting the administration’s China policy to a much less hawkish position.
There were no new meetings with the Dalai Lama, contrary to what Clinton had once promised. Sanctions were eased, then lifted. Many of the pro-China advocates in the Clinton administration went on to be thanked as China drew attention to their farsighted statesmanship, and to the greater access to Chinese decision makers they received by virtue of their being what Beijing has labeled “friends of China.”
An important aspect of China’s propaganda campaign within the Clinton administration involved spreading the message that China was in trouble on multiple fronts and too much external pressure would threaten the country with collapse. Pillsbury recounts visiting Beijing in 1996 and being taken in by the Chinese-manufactured narrative “that China was in serious economic and political peril – and that the potential for collapse loomed large.” The Chinese hosts of his delegation described one internal problem after another, from widespread pollution to ethnic unrest, and he listened with a credulity an uncharitable reader might call criminally naive: “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.” Was that meant to be a laugh-out-loud line? Of course, this disclosure that Pillsbury thought was meant exclusively for super-cool diplomatic insiders such as himself and Robert Ellsworth was actually part of a larger effort by the Chinese government to spread the message through various American experts that China was struggling.
China had a clear interest in making itself appear weaker than it really was so that the still-developing nation wouldn’t come across as a challenger to America’s hard-won hegemony. Acceptance of this narrative in the West, however, also advanced the interests of figures in the U.S. foreign-policy establishment who’d spent their careers cultivating relationships with China. Pillsbury himself had enjoyed a great deal of professional advancement by continually advocating for U.S. aid to China, and China’s apparent need of that aid made Pillsbury and his fellow panda-huggers look quite humanitarian. In a case reminiscent of Steven Pinker’s maxim that “progressives hate progress” those concerned with aid to China likely had incentives to downplay the effectiveness of their aid programs insofar as a stronger China would no longer be in need of such aid. “While we worried about China’s woes,” Pillsbury writes wryly, “its economy more than doubled.” How about that.
China’s view of the United States in the aftermath of the Cold War was already not great, but it took a serious turn for the worse in 1999 when “the United States led its NATO allies” in a midnight bombing run over Belgrade (for my American readers, that’s the capital of Serbia, a small country in the armpit of Europe). As fate would have it, these bombs landed on the Chinese embassy and killed three employees. A Chinese dissident told Pillsbury to expect anti-American riots in response, on the grounds that China would not share America’s view of this event as “a terrible accident.” On the contrary, he stated confidently, “They will see it as an American warning and a test of China’s resolve,” and he was absolutely right. Over the next few days rioters surrounded the U.S. embassy in Beijing as China’s foreign minister demanded “an open and official apology” from “U.S.-led NATO.” China was not assuaged by President Clinton’s repeated public apologies; rather, they put the maximally uncharitable spin on things, calling the Belgrade bombing a “barbaric crime” and comparing the United States to Nazi Germany based on its ambitions to be “lord of the earth.” Pillsbury also highlights a troubling novelty in the messaging of these protesters:
In contrast to the Chinese version of the Statue of Liberty erected during the prodemocracy demonstrations at Tiananmen Square ten years earlier, Chinese students now carried posters vilifying the United States… They also made a cardboard Statue of Liberty with the face of Bill Clinton, who was holding a bloody bomb instead of a torch.
Technically, NATO forces did kill Chinese citizens with bombs dropped onto sovereign Chinese soil, but, you know, accidents happen, and from Pillsbury’s perspective it should have been obvious that the Americans were the good guys. The U.S. gained a much better understanding of the Chinese government’s views on the situation in 2001 thanks to the intelligence community’s acquisition of “the classified minutes of an emergency Politburo meeting” held in response to the bombing. He relates with palpable disappointment that “not a single leader came to America’s defense,” and nobody even “raised the possibility that this bombing was an accident.” “So much,” he concludes, “for the goodwill and trust our programs since 1973 should have built up in Beijing.”
In classic American style, however, he refused to give up hope on “China’s inevitable progress toward democracy,” believing that China’s relationship with the United States would improve “if only Washington would show patience.” Pillsbury and his colleagues severely failed in their reassessment of U.S.-China relations after the Cold War, likely because they held to the geopolitical axiom that America’s role in history was to spread free markets and liberal democracy to the benighted nations of the world. This seems straightforward enough on the assumption that the American way of life is universally considered good, but from the perspective of a truly foreign civilization like China, this approach to diplomacy must seem like just the latest in a series of Western imperial projects seeking to dominate the world. And if the United States can dominate the world, why can’t China?
Amerikanisches Requiem
“Now an implacable age looms over the world. We forged that age, we who are now its victim.”
– Jorge Luis Borges, “Deutsches Requiem
The world today is a single sphere of influence, more or less, and becoming more so by the day. In the frenzy of globalization that has taken place since the Cold War, it seems that America has lost sight of the particularity of American values. American cultural colonization of the developed world has been so thorough that it’s tempting to think America’s national values are synonymous with civilization itself. Sure, the Chinese have been deceptive in their flattery of the West while pursuing courses of action antagonistic to Western values, but, frankly, deception is what the United States should expect from a rival nation like China, and the American foreign-policy establishment would not have been misled about China’s true intentions and capabilities if they had not been so willing to be misled by their own wishful thinking.
America likes to see herself as the benefactress of the world, protectress of the weak and elevatress of the downtrodden, so for decades now she has looked on China with the magnanimity of an enchanted nanny. Her reluctance to recognize the reality of China’s threat to the American world order is partly the result of simple epistemic inertia – priors carried over without update from a time when China really was a weaker and less-developed country – and partly the willful blindness of an American establishment that thinks everybody loves it; but Marathon makes a credible case that the Chinese government has carried out a systematic campaign of deception regarding its true understanding of China’s position on the world stage and its geopolitical goals in the twenty-first century. This is where Pillsbury is at its most conspiratorial, but again, it seems straightforwardly plausible that the leaders of a rising world power would conspire to hide its true strength for the sake of appearing docile to more dominant nations.
One rather unique figure who has expressed the strong conviction that China seeks nothing less than its own global hegemony is the late great Lee Kuan Yew. “It is China’s intention to be the greatest power in the world,” the father of Singapore wrote in a 2012 book, “and to be accepted as China, not as an honorary member of the West. … At the core of their mind-set is their world before colonization and the exploitation and humiliation that brought.” “If you believe that there is going to be a revolution of some sort in China for democracy,” he warns, “you are wrong. … The Chinese people want a revived China.” It would be foolish of China not to leverage its superior numbers and robust industrial base for greater power and influence around the world, and if American diplomatic cables have knit the world into an electric ecumenopolis, then the whole globe will just have to do.
Returning to The China Dream, Liu Mingfu states explicitly that “China’s grand goal in the 21st century is to become the world’s No. 1 power.” What might this do to the world? Time will tell, but “China is both secretive and sensitive about the end state of the Marathon,” having “never spelled out exactly what [a China-led world order] will be like, except to declare it will be a good thing.” Colonel Liu himself insisted to ABC News in 2010 that “China’s competition and ultimate victory over the West would be peaceful,” but let’s look at it from the outside view: how peaceful was America’s rise to power? How about the British Empire’s? How many of China’s historic hegemons conquered “all under heaven” through peaceful means? The WWII memorial in Washington bears the inscription, “AMERICANS CAME TO LIBERATE, NOT TO CONQUER, TO RESTORE FREEDOM AND TO END TYRANNY,” which back in the twentieth century (’90s kid here!) must have seemed quite noble and not at all like a sick joke. Cold comfort it may be, but as the American empire wanes and China ascends to superpower status, we can at least be confident that whatever the Chinese do with us, they will assure us it is for our own good.
Years before The China Dream, the philosopher Zhao Tingyang published his ominously-titled 2005 work of political philosophy, The Under-Heaven System: The Philosophy of the World Institution, which lays out his vision for a, well, new world order. Zhao’s term for this new order is tianxia, for which Pillsbury offers the translations “under-heaven,” “empire,” and “China.” He cites William Callahan’s definition of tianxia as “a unified global system with China’s ‘superior’ civilization at the top,” an empire that “values order over freedom, ethics over law, and elite governance over democracy and human rights.” Pillsbury met with Zhao in 2012 and heard from him personally that China would ideally enforce this system with “a four-to-one military superiority.” When discussing China’s dream of overwhelming military superiority, Pillsbury makes the telling point that “America itself had [built up a world-conquering military] between 1860 and 1940,” and the Chinese could only be expected to follow suit.
Unipolar Opposites
America’s unipolar dominance of the world since the Cold War has tied together all the earth’s nations into a global economy, which has generally been good for world peace. Pillsbury supported China’s entry into the World Trade Organization based in part on Thomas Friedman’s so-called Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, according to which “no two countries that both had McDonald’s had fought a war against each other since each got its McDonald’s.” The point is not without merit, that global economic interdependence reduces the likelihood of major international conflict, but this kind of thinking fails to consider that maybe not everyone around the world wants American marketeers to turn their homeland into another McDonaldland. While the influence of the American global empire might bring unprecedented material prosperity and a sense of individual freedom to many cultures, the values propagated by American foreign policy are far from universal.
“For China,” Pillsbury writes, “personal rights in the American sense do not exist,” and the Chinese word for “rights,” chuan li, is the 1860s coinage of an American missionary. The Chinese subordinate individual identity to group membership on the grounds that “to be human is to be an appendage of a larger humanity.” As a consequence, China does not see democracy as an unalloyed good, and Pillsbury claims “Chinese officials prefer a world with more autocracies and fewer democracies.” To support this claim he cites China’s support for African strongmen Robert Mugabe and Omar al-Bashir, who certainly are not nice guys, but let’s be honest, the United States has supported more than its fair share of strongmen throughout its own history. As a certain U.S.-president-cum-deep-cover-Russian-operative famously quipped, “You think our country’s so innocent?”
CIA coups and banana republics merit not a mention in Marathon, but Pillsbury is quick to condemn China’s “strategic lending and investment,” noting that in 2009-10, “China provided more loans to firms and governments in developing countries than did the World Bank,” presumably using this financial leverage to “advance its political agenda around the world.” Here Pillsbury shows the presupposition of an American imperialist that China’s political agenda is inferior to the agenda of the World Bank. Not that I disagree, I’m just pointing it out. The mask really slips, too, when he describes China’s sinister plot to “advance an anti-Western agenda through unconditional lending assistance in Africa.” That’s right, unconditional, as in “devoid of human rights riders and financial safeguards.” I don’t know what “human rights riders” are (I assume it’s something to do with saying “gay”?) but talk of rights has been too often used by the American hegemon to force its values down the throat of an unwilling world. For more on this, let’s turn once again to the good old U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, who report that in China’s view, the U.S. is attempting to “maintain global hegemony by engaging in the shameless pursuit of ‘power politics’ often disguised as a quest for democratization.” The same commission says Beijing has “labeled U.S. involvement in Bosnia and Kosovo as an attempt to maintain U.S. dominance in Europe” and “characterized the enlargement of NATO as an effort to contain and encircle China,” (which is of course ridiculous paranoia, as NATO’s expansion is obviously an effort to contain and encircle Russia).
If China and the United States truly differ in their values, there are a few ways the conflict can be resolved. Most simply, everybody could give up their dreams of world domination and let the world settle out into a multipolar archipelago of cultural clades. While China’s leaders might “claim to want a multipolar world in which the United States is the first among equals,” there is plenty of evidence that China has a definite interest in assigning itself that number-one spot. According to Pillsbury, the Chinese do not think a multipolar world is a likely outcome but that it will be “a strategic waypoint en route to a new global hierarchy in which China is alone at the top.” He cites Chinese assessments of national power, which “unambiguously predict that a multipolar world will return to a unipolar order as economic growth trends continue.” When Chinese leaders speak of the new order they envision, they generally use the term da tong, which according to Pillsbury is “often mistranslated by Western scholars as ‘commonwealth’ or ‘an era of harmony,’” but “is better translated as ‘an era of unipolar dominance.’” This is another case where Pillsbury makes a bold claim founded on his expert knowledge, and the reader has to take his word for it, but the way this book presents Chinese ideas about power and deception make his interpretation seem much more plausible than it would in isolation. As the Chinese proverb states, “There cannot be two suns in the sky.”
End of an Empire
With the stakes as high as literal world domination, China has quite the incentive to keep its plans secret from the United States. The Chinese know how a hegemon treats its rivals. “Chinese leaders view the global environment as fundamentally zero-sum,” Pillsbury writes, “and they plan to show the same lack of mercy toward America that they believe the long line of China-hating American imperialists—dating back to John Tyler—have showed toward them.” This is a troubling prospect indeed. Possibly more troubling, however, is Pillsbury’s failure to acknowledge the role of American imperialism in bringing the world to its current precarious state. As the Chinese tell it, “the United States used trade, economic cooperation, technology transfers, diplomacy, cultural and educational exchanges, and pressure for democratic reforms to weaken the Soviet Union from within” in a decades-long “plan for global dominance.” If, as the CCP believes, “the Americans deliberately deceived the Soviet Union and caused its collapse,” that would be a good reason for a nation like China to distrust the United States.
The Chinese may not fear military conquest and subjugation by American troops, but they are proud of their culture and resent seeing it Americanized. Pillsbury dissects the 2013 Chinese propaganda film Silent Contest with its description of “efforts by the United States to infiltrate Chinese society,” and finds that “the chief American culprits include … mechanisms for exposing American and Chinese elites to each other.” This makes the American worldview seem like a contagion which spreads among the international elite and trickles down from them to their respective nations. That’s not a bad metaphor actually, and it’s reinforced by the film’s encouraging the Chinese to “take careful precaution and look out for the smallest detail, and build a strong political and ideological line of defense.” Such immunization against American cultural pathogens may be China’s only hope to “fend off the ‘so-called democratic forces’ that brought down the Soviet Union and that America is grooming to bring down China.” Is America a nation of groomers? Who can say, but they certainly seem to enjoy putting their hands all over other countries and, wait, I already used that line about the throat of an unwilling world, but you get the idea.
China’s defensiveness against American imperialism may be truly paranoid, but Pillsbury keeps tossing out recommendations that the U.S. do things like “monitor and influence the debate between China’s hawks and reformers.” Of course this is the kind of thing that nations do to one another all the time, but that’s exactly why the Chinese perceive such a need for defensive secrecy. Pillsbury thinks “the U.S. State Department should fund more projects to promote the development of the rule of law and civil society in China,” and he calls for “election observation missions and technical assistance in drafting local election regulations and improving oversight of budgets and government decision making,” which I’m sure the CCP would welcome with open arms. Of course, “America must also get serious about promoting free-market reforms” that “would shrink the advantages of the state-owned enterprises, including the ‘national champions,’” presumably regardless of how the Chinese might feel about these changes. Forgive me my ignorance, as I’m writing this from Middle America, but when did any of this become the business of the U.S. State department? Oh, I almost forgot, “We also need projects that increase the capacity of independent nongovernmental organizations.” (!!!)
This piece of writing is threatening to break me, so I’ll close with Pillsbury’s plaint that American foreign-policy types were not privy to China’s internal debate about privatizing its state-owned enterprises in the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse: “Had we known, it would have been wise to support those seeking a truly liberalizing path,” which is true, it would have been wise, but that’s exactly why countries like China are seeking to throw off the heavy hand of American soft power. “We learned later that, after the Soviet collapse in 1991, some influential Chinese politicians wanted to follow Russia’s reform model. We could have backed those advocates and opposed [the hard-liners who wanted to preserve CCP control]. But we did not know about the secret debate.” This is Pillsbury at his most oblivious to the Chinese perspective. Maybe the Chinese kept this debate secret because the United States doesn’t actually have the right to influence their internal decisions about how to run their economy. With characteristic American shamelessness, Pillsbury laments that if the Clinton administration had learned about this debate ahead of time, “perhaps different decisions could have been made in Washington.” In Washington? Does this man have brainworms?
Recent events, of course, suggest that the world outside America’s borders harbors more discontent with the American empire than most imperial functionaries have ever suspected. So while The Hundred-Year Marathon is an excellent read, it’s clear that its author in gaining his expertise has so thoroughly internalized the American imperialist perspective that he cannot step outside it, which gives the whole thing a tragic sort of tone. As a high-level diplomatic player it might truly have never occurred to Michael Pillsbury to question whether Washington, DC deserves to be the capital of the world.