"Michael Pillsbury's China Nightmare" By Jared McKinney chinausfocus.com 4/26/2016
//Nonetheless, in a surprise move, Pillsbury does not call for a new era of Cold-War style containment. “There is no global ideological struggle, no need to create an anti-China alliance akin to the NATO alliance to contain an expanding empire.” Instead, America should revive “the support for democracy and civil society groups within China.” Pillsbury laments that the U.S. spends only $50 million on democracy promotion in China annually, and thinks America should build domestic and international organizations, “a grand coalition” to bring “change to China.” In particular, the U.S. should focus on ending any technical or bureaucratic aid it provides China, fighting “anti-American competitive conduct,” exposing censorship, and seeking to maintain America’s military and economic superiority. The way to avoid the China nightmare of 2049, apparently, is to forge a strategy for competition and match China on its own terms.// [白邦瑞並沒有呼籲或主張要對中國採取過去對付蘇聯的冷戰型態的圍堵，他主張美國應該重啟在中國境內支持民主與公民社會團體的政策。白邦瑞對美國每年只提撥五千萬美元的預算做為在中國境內促進民主一事悲嘆，他認為，美國應該建立國內與國際組織，以及建立一個「大聯盟」，以便為中國帶來變革。]
"Michael Pillsbury's China Nightmare" By Jared McKinney chinausfocus.com 4/26/2016
In his new book, The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (St Martin’s Griffin Edition: March 2016), Michael Pillsbury, a long-time Pentagon insider, reveals—for the first time ever—China’s historically unprecedented strategy to become an independent, strong, prosperous, and respected global power. Not content to be an undeveloped nation of poor peasants and menial factory workers, the Chinese have a secret plan to make their nation “the greatest power in the world,” Pillsbury explains. No longer willing to passively accept the shame of being a divided nation exploited by its neighbors, China—Pillsbury argues breathtakingly—has a coherent (and secret!) economic, political, and military plan to make China great again.
What is so shocking about this secret plan is that it belies the expectations of the Washington, D.C. intelligentsia. “We believed,” Pillsbury explains, “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.” U.S. engagement with China, which Pillsbury himself helped promote during his many decades as the Defense Department’s go-to China expert, was supposed to bring “complete cooperation” and “permanent” friendship between the two great nations. That was why America was willing to accept rapprochement with China during the Nixon Administration. But gradually Pillsbury, mostly alone among the nation’s China experts, came to see the light: the Chinese “had deceived me and the American government.” China was supposed to meekly rise into someone else’s order. China and America were to “become true allies forever.” Instead, having initiated rapprochement in 1969, China used American scientific, military, and business know-how to craftily strengthen itself for a long-term competition. The Soviet Union was only a passing meteor in this struggle for greatness—surpassing the U.S. was always China’s true ambition.
Pillsbury’s book reveals this mendacious Chinese plot, and points out where America went wrong. Rapprochement with China during the Cold War he rates as tolerably strategic: after all, it was useful to have China on America’s side. Where the U.S. really went wrong was at Tiananmen. It was then that it became clear that “the winds of democracy” had all but ceased to blow, and certainly were not “creating new hope,” as President George Herbert Walker Bush had remarked in February 1989. Instead of preserving its increasingly positive relationship with China after June 4, 1989, the U.S. should have supported “the Chinese exiles in Paris” and forced China to privatize its SOEs, even though (as Pillsbury himself admits) there was simply not enough money in the Chinese economy to purchase these state assets and (again, as Pillsbury admits) all the other Asian Tigers developed their economies initially with state supported enterprises.
But America did not act, in Pillsbury’s telling, and so China’s anti-democratic turn picked up speed. It was after the Tiananmen crackdown that the Chinese patriotic education campaign kicked off, poisoning the minds of Chinese youth and spreading lies about America’s past history. This Chinese “hypernationalism” was activated by China’s leaders in 1999 when the U.S. bombed China’s embassy in Belgrade, killing three. In response, China’s leaders seemed to believe their own propaganda. As the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission declared in 2002, they believed “that the fundamental drive of the United States is to maintain global hegemony by engaging in the shameless pursuit of ‘power politics,’ often disguised as a quest for democratization.” For the Chinese, America had now become, says Pillsbury, “the great Satan.”
This belief, mixed with China’s own “psychological peculiarities,” produced a set of fears in China: namely, that America had a war plan to blockade China (it did not help that a former Japanese naval chief of staff said that the U.S. and Japan would, in a contingency, contain Chinese forces within the First Island Chain), that America would exploit China’s weakness in its near seas, threaten China’s sea lines of communication, and encourage rebels and terrorism inside China. The way for China to deal with the great Satan and these dangerous strategies, Pillsbury explains, is the Assassin’s Mace—a secret weapon called shashoujian in Chinese. This weapon, following the lessons of ancient Chinese strategy, will target America where it is weak by developing asymmetric capabilities that today go by the name A2/AD (Anti-Access Area Denial).
So what if China succeeds? What if it realizes its China Dream 2049? The answer, Pillsbury says, is simple: “many websites will be filled with rewritten history defaming the West and praising China; and pollution will contaminate the air in more countries . . . in a race to the bottom in food safety and environmental standards. . . . species could disappear, ocean levels will rise, and cancer will spread. . . . Chinese state-owned monopolies will dominate the global marketplace, and one of the world’s mightiest military alliances may be controlled by Beijing.” Unless America intervenes and makes China pay a price “for its behavior,” this is the future we all should look forward to.
Nonetheless, in a surprise move, Pillsbury does not call for a new era of Cold-War style containment. “There is no global ideological struggle, no need to create an anti-China alliance akin to the NATO alliance to contain an expanding empire.” Instead, America should revive “the support for democracy and civil society groups within China.” Pillsbury laments that the U.S. spends only $50 million on democracy promotion in China annually, and thinks America should build domestic and international organizations, “a grand coalition” to bring “change to China.” In particular, the U.S. should focus on ending any technical or bureaucratic aid it provides China, fighting “anti-American competitive conduct,” exposing censorship, and seeking to maintain America’s military and economic superiority.
The way to avoid the China nightmare of 2049, apparently, is to forge a strategy for competition and match China on its own terms. Now, if you happen to disagree with Pillsbury’s narrative, it’s probably because you’ve been duped by Chinese propaganda, influenced by the money your institution receives from the Chinese government, or even more basically, you do not understand the lessons of China’s Warring States period. (Happily for Pillsbury, paid employees of the U.S. Defense Department have no such biases.) As a disbeliever, you are members of the “Red Team.” You are a “good assistant” and perform an important public relations role for the Chinese government, but in fact you are perpetuating the deception foisted on America by China’s devious leaders. So please, dear reader, bear this in mind as you weigh the words that follow.
Much could be said of Pillsbury’s arguments, but perhaps it is enough to make four points.
First, in the annals of history you will find nothing particularly Chinese in the desire for a nation to become independent, prosperous, and powerful—in a word, great (or even, the greatest). In the ancient Greek world, polities competed for honor (timē) by telling glorious stories about their past and winning victories in battle. The polity that could do these things the best became the hegemon—the legitimate authority. In East Asia, of course, China historically filled this role, until, that is, civil war and western imperialism led to a hundred years of humiliation. Modern European history has been one of unremitting competition between states, and many historians have viewed it as a constant succession of hegemonies (e.g., Portugal to Holland to Britain to America). The most peaceful period of this history—the long-nineteenth century (1815-1914)—occurred when Europe’s five major powers recognized one another as “great” andlimited the competition in important ways. Today Marco Rubio seeks to create a “New American Century.” Donald Trump declares he will “Make America Great Again!” Is it really such a secret that other nations—China, yes, but also Russia and even Brazil—seek greatness as well? The answer of course is no, and that unceremoniously deflates the entire premise of Pillsbury’s book.
Second, the idea that China would become a sort of American lackey, democratic and free—America’s “permanent” friend—would be laughable, except for the fact that Pillsbury and many others in the American policy community seemed to have in fact believed it. Nothing short of ignorance and naiveté can explain such a belief. The Sino-American rapprochement was from the beginning rooted in the interests of both nations, not their identities. China needed rapprochement because of the imminent threat of the Soviet Union; America needed rapprochement in order to end the Vietnam War with some semblance of honor. This was IR 101: two states balancing against a third, which posed a threat to both. But forget academic theories—Pillsbury could have just read Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Empire, in which the Foundation and the independent trading worlds, theretofore rivals, join together to oppose a rising power threatening both of them (“the Mule”). There is no mystery here, and no speculation on China’s supposed culture of deception is necessary to explain the Sino-American alliance. After the USSR collapsed, a benign threat environment, Deng’s societal transformation, and increasing trade and personal contact sustained the relationship. China and America, in this new era, would cooperate where their interests conjoined and compete where they differed. There was no end of history here and no democratic convergence, though these liberal nostrums seem to have deceived Pillsbury and the Washington, D.C. elite.
Third, Pillsbury’s description of his 2049 China Nightmare takes every negative trend and aspect of Chinese society and simply projects it forward thirty years. This is a picture perfect example of the “linear projection fallacy.” Since China is polluted today, it (and its trading partners) will be even worse in the future; since Chinese individuals steal intellectual property (IP) today, they will steal even more in the future; since China has aided “rogue states” in the past, it will do so to an even greater extent in the future, etc. This argument is stunningly irresponsible. Industrialization is a process. Industrializing states (including the U.S.) have historically stolen other nations’ IP, polluted the environment, and permitted terrible working conditions for workers. As states grow richer they begin to care more about IP (because they are creating it), to pay more attention to the environment (once you are not dying from malnourishment, you can start worrying about air quality), to reform their labor and trade policies (because of domestic pressures), and to worry more about global instability (because of close trade dependencies). This process is occurring in China today.
Here’s the proof: in terms of pollution, 2015 was the cleanest year in Beijing since numbers were first recorded in 2008, and pollution fell by around 15 percent in scores of other cities. In fact, today it is not authoritarian China but democratic India that has the world’s most polluted cities, a fact Pillsbury seems blissfully (and conveniently) unaware of. In 2014, the Chinese Government declared “war on pollution” and Premier Li Keqiang pledged to shut down coal-fired factories and power plants. He has kept his promise: in 2016 alone, 1,000 coal mines will be shut down, and coal-burning power generation is projected to drop annually by 2-4 percent. When I lived in Beijing last year, Chinese students regularly told me that the environment was the most important issue to them (“environmental studies” is an increasingly popular degree, unsurprisingly). The government understands this. Cleaning up the environment has become a legitimacy issue for the CCP, and the trend of the future is not coal burning and steel manufacturing but clean solar energy, high-tech infrastructure, and professional services. Similar points could be made about labor reforms and China’s support for global order, but I digress.
Finally, even if you believe everything Pillsbury says about the 2049 China Nightmare, you should recognize that his “solution” is inadequate. If China really is a rising giant that—by just 2030—will have half the per-capita GDP of the U.S. and twice the overall GDP by Justin Yifu Lin’s projections, how will reduced U.S.-China cooperation (which Pillsbury recommends) and increased American competitiveness change anything in the long term? Pillsbury understands the trend of China’s rise, and so instead he places his hope in America’s ability to influence China’s domestic politics. But to “support prodemocracy reformers” as Pillsbury recommends, would reinforce China’s paranoia, not reassure it. As he says himself, Chinese leaders view such interference as aimed at dividing and weakening the Chinese state. The logical response to such U.S. interference is bolstered authoritarianism, the very thing Pillsbury seems to decry. Perhaps, though, this is what he would like to see happen, as increased authoritarianism would hamper Chinese economic growth and intensify popular disquiet. Two can play the game of deception.
All this being said, Pillsbury is right about one point that deserves great emphasis. Though a “hawk” himself, he decries other anti-China hawks who speak loosely about China’s desire to “dominate” its region through offensive military force. There is simply no evidence in Chinese sources for such a view, though this would surprise Filipino president Benigno Aquino: “No serious Chinese scholar advocates the approach to conquest of Hitler or Stalin or Tojo. No ying pai hawk author ever raises a strategy of territorial expansion or global ideological domination.” A bid to become a great power is not the same as a bid to seek “domination” through conquest, a point all too frequently forgotten by China’s critics.
Liu Mingfu has a China Dream. Michael Pillsbury has a China Nightmare. The Dream is for China to become a powerful global leader that assumes its rightful place in the world as a respected and prestigious nation. The Nightmare is that China achieves this and then imposes its values on the world. Pillsbury hopes that as China grows, its values will evolve towards openness, but because he thinks the CCP has already fooled him once in this regard, he thinks America needs to lead a coalition that somehow forces domestic reform in China. The fears and paranoia of Chinese society make such an outcome fanciful. America’s goal should be, above all, to maintain peaceful relations with China. America’s hope should be that peace will grow into trust and trust into friendship. Among great powers in a nuclear world, a friend can pull harder than an enemy can push.
//------我平常最喜歡讀美國國防部顧問白邦瑞(Dr. Michael Pillsbury)與Australian National University的榮譽教授Dr. Paul Dibb所寫的文章或報告，他們兩位都是軍事與安全領域的專家，而且都對老共的霸權圖謀了解極深，同時都對老共的擴張野心保持高度警惕，如果西方國家的戰略家、軍事家與國安事務專家學者都有他們這樣的學養、認識、態度與立場，那我們台灣人今天的處境肯定不會像現在這麼糟糕與危殆。
不讓美國人民知道老共與中國人的帝國圖謀，這是何等地嚴重。 白邦瑞把這些事情寫成一本書，書名叫”The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower” (百年的馬拉松競賽: 中國欲取代美國做為新的世界霸權的秘密戰略)。//[重貼或引述結束]
白邦瑞大約在十年前以來，就在某些情況或場合中，特別是在給國防部的一些報告中，就很清楚地指出中國對美國與自由世界的威脅，老共對這種情況當然也有些掌握[老共也不是省油的燈，他們以前就吸收美國National Defense University(國防大學)的Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs(中國軍事事務研究中心)的主任做他們的間諜]，我們現在就請鄉親們來讀中共的喉舌所登載的一篇文章。
台灣建州運動發起人周威霖 David C. Chou Founder, Formosa Statehood Movement (an organization devoted in current stage to making Taiwan a territorial commonwealth of the United States)
附錄一
“Book: CIA Concealed 'Anti-U.S.' Tirades By Chinese Leaders From American Public” BY DANIEL HALPER WEEKLYSTANDARD.COM JAN 30, 2015
A new book set to be released next week alleges that the CIA took steps to prevent anti-American tirades from Chinese Communist officials from being heard in America. The details are revealed in Michael Pillsbury's The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, which will be released next week.
"Most American officials ignored the anti-American signs altogether. Some of the anti-U.S. evidence was even suppressed," Pillsbury writes.
On a routine visit in the 1990s to the CIA translation center in Reston, Virginia, I asked a translator why so few examples of Chinese leaders’ anti-American tirades appeared in its reports.
Almost all U.S. officials relied on translations from the center to follow what was on the Chinese leadership’s mind, because so few can actually read—and grasp the many crucial nuances of—the Chinese language.
“That’s easy,” she replied. “I have instructions not to translate nationalistic stuff.”
I was puzzled by this. “Why?” I asked her.
“The China division at headquarters told me it would just inflame both the conservatives and left-wing human rights advocates here in Washington and hurt relations with China.”
Pillsbury, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, "was the Assistant Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning and responsible for implementation of the program of covert aid known as the Reagan Doctrine," according to his biography.
附錄二
China’s Secret Strategy Exposed Beijing Plots to Surpass U.S. in Coming Decades BY: Bill Gertz February 2, 2015 5:00 am http://freebeacon.com/natio…/chinas-secret-strategy-exposed/
China launched a secret 100-year modernization program that deceived successive U.S. administrations into unknowingly promoting Beijing’s strategy of replacing the U.S.-led world order with a Chinese communist-dominated economic and political system, according to a new book by a longtime Pentagon China specialist.
For more than four decades, Chinese leaders lulled presidents, cabinet secretaries, and other government analysts and policymakers into falsely assessing China as a benign power deserving of U.S. support, says Michael Pillsbury, the Mandarin-speaking analyst who has worked on China policy and intelligence issues for every U.S. administration since Richard Nixon.
The secret strategy, based on ancient Chinese statecraft, produced a large-scale transfer of cash, technology, and expertise that bolstered military and Communist Party “superhawks” in China who are now taking steps to catch up to and ultimately surpass the United States, Pillsbury concludes in a book published this week. The Chinese strategic deception program was launched by Mao Zedong in 1955 and put forth the widespread misbelief that China is a poor, backward, inward-looking country. “And therefore the United States has to help them, and give away things to them, to make sure they stay friendly,” Pillsbury said in an interview. “This is totally wrong.”
The Chinese strategy also is aimed at gaining global economic dominance, he says, noting that China’s military buildup is but one part. The combined economic, political, and military power is seeking to produce China as a new global “hegemon” that will export its anti-democratic political system and predatory economic practices around the world.
In the interview, Pillsbury, currently director of the Hudson Institute’s Center for Chinese Strategy, said new details contained in the book were cleared for publication by the FBI, CIA, and Defense Department, including details of formerly classified presidential directives, testimony from previously unknown Chinese defectors, and alarming details of writings from powerful Chinese military and political hawks.
The book also discloses for the first time that the opening to China in 1969 and 1970, considered one of the United States’ most significant strategic gambits, was not initiated by then-President Nixon’s top national security aide Henry Kissinger. Instead, Pillsbury shows that it was Chinese generals who played the United States card against the Soviet Union, amid fears of a takeover of the country by Moscow.
Some sensitive details were removed from the manuscript by the government. However, the totality of the book represents an authorized disclosure of China’s secret strategy that is among the most significant releases of internal U.S. government information in over a decade, Pillsbury said.
“That highlights the importance of the book,” Pillsbury said in an interview. “And it sends a message to China: We’re not as clueless as you think.”
Pillsbury also reveals how a Chinese government defector exposed Beijing’s effective lobbying campaign from 1995 to 2000 that led Congress to approve Most-Favored National trade status for China—several years after China was sanctioned for the bloody massacre by the military of unarmed protesters in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square.
The covert influence operation was carried out at a time when American concerns about Chinese human rights violations were high. Yet China was able to successfully induce U.S. leaders into making key strategic trade concessions.
That covert influence program was revealed by one of the six Chinese defectors Pillsbury questioned over the years, including one who turned out to be a false defector—FBI informant Katrina Leung, who was arrested in 2003.
“I tried to put a defector interview into the opening of each chapter,” Pillsbury said, noting that the defectors remain in witness protection programs and “fear for their lives” due to the possibility of Chinese retaliation.
The defectors disclosed details of “what China is trying to do to America in what they call the 100-year marathon,” he said.
On the Chinese hawks, Pillsbury said internal writings of these powerful political and military leaders revealed “how they draw lessons from China’s ancient past … and how can they surpass America without the Americans reacting.”
Pillsbury, whose most senior government post was assistant undersecretary of defense for policy planning in the administration of President Ronald Reagan, also worked for several senators and has been a consultant on China policy for decades.
In the book, Pillsbury acknowledged that initially he was among the staunchest advocates of the U.S. policy of “constructive engagement” toward China launched initially in 1969 as a way to prevent a Soviet takeover in Beijing.
Asked when he abandoned his pro-China, “panda hugger” views, he said: “Over time … mainly after Tiananmen”—a reference to the brutal 1989 military crackdown on pro-democracy protesters in Beijing’s main square.
“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,” Pillsbury wrote.
“Every one of the assumptions behind that belief was wrong—dangerously so,” he stated, noting that the power of China’s now dominant faction of anti-American ultranationalists was underestimated.
Pillsbury’s book, The Hundred Year Marathon, reveals new details of secret CIA cooperation with China in covert action programs in Afghanistan and Angola, as well as nearly $1 billion worth of weapons transfers during the 1980s.
The covert support for China, along with a continuing flow of U.S. technology and intelligence for the past 45 years, were once among the U.S. government’s most closely guarded secrets.
The book also declassifies details of several presidential memoranda behind the covert U.S. policy of supporting China that Pillsbury states produced one of the United States’ most significant strategic blunders.
Documents and intelligence reports smuggled out of China after the bloody Tiananmen massacre, when tanks were called in to disperse tens of thousands of unarmed pro-democracy protesters, revealed that senior Chinese leaders were sharply divided over supporting the students’ calls for democratic political reform, according to the book.
Communist super hawks in the military and senior Party leadership managed to defeat and ultimately arrest senior Party officials who supported the pro-democracy reform.
The book also provides the following new disclosures on China’s strategy toward the United States:
• Chinese hardliners promoted the book of Col. Liu Mingfu, “The China Dream” that is the inspiration behind current Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s increasingly Maoist policies. Other writings by hawks reveal a future China-dominated world will that values “order over freedom, ethics over law and elite governance over democracy and human rights.”
• U.S. intelligence agencies for decades underestimated the influence of Chinese hawks and continue to dismiss their power and influence as “fringe” elements.
• Intelligence assessments in the late 1980s failed to recognize the pro-democracy sentiment inside the ruling Politburo was strong until it was crushed after the 1989 crackdown on dissent.
• After Tiananmen, China’s government created a false history to hide its past covert cooperation with the United States.
• China’s “assassin’s mace” weapons—missiles and other exotic arms—are being built to defeat satellites and knock out aircraft carriers, using high-tech arms, including electromagnetic pulse weapons.
• As part of covert U.S. offers of assistance to China in the 1970s, the CIA cut off aid to the exiled Tibetan leader the Dalai Lama and canceled U.S. Navy patrols through the Taiwan Strait. Instead, the CIA began providing intelligence on the Soviet Union to China.
• Reagan agreed to sell six major weapons systems to China but required that continued aid be conditioned on China remaining unaligned with Moscow and liberalizing its communist system. The arms transfers were halted after Tiananmen.
• World Bank assistance to China imposed no conditions on China moving toward free market reforms. As a result, China’s government today continues to control most industries.
• China will undermine the United Nations and World Trade Organization to “delegitimize” the U.S.-led world order in order to promote its global system.
• An internal secret briefing for Chinese officials discussed China’s most important foreign policy priority as “how to manage the decline of the United States,” revealing that China is working against U.S. interests in supporting rogue states and selling arms to America’s enemies.
To counter what Pillsbury describes as China’s “warring states era” strategy for world dominance, an approach that outlines how a lesser power can defeat a stronger foe, the United States needs to recognize the threat and take urgent steps to prevent China from dominating the world.
Pillsbury said that as part of efforts to counter the Chinese military buildup, the Pentagon’s next budget will include funding for up to 100 new long-range bombers, funds for hardening U.S. satellites against Chinese attacks, and money for a Navy program to protect U.S. aircraft carriers from China’s carrier-killing DF-21D anti-ship ballistic missile.
附錄三
“Panda Hugger Turned Slugger” By HOWARD W. FRENCH THE WALL STREET JOURNAL Feb. 26, 2015
---For years, Pillsbury’s view fit the Washington consensus: China, with the help of the U.S., would become a peaceful power. No longer.
During the first half of his long career in defense and intelligence, Michael Pillsbury was what he now calls a “panda hugger.” He took a consistently positive view of China’s future and of the payoff awaiting the United States for assisting in its emergence—an outlook that fit comfortably within the longtime Washington consensus. He writes in “The Hundred-Year Marathon”: “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.”
No longer. “Looking back,” Mr. Pillsbury concludes, “it is painful that I was so gullible.”
Mr. Pillsbury, who was the assistant under secretary of defense for policy planning during the Reagan administration, has been evolving in a sharply different direction since the 1990s, when Chinese politics turned strongly nationalistic after the Tiananmen Square incident. In time, he became one of the most ardent and sometimes shrill messengers about the threat China poses to the U.S. “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower” is a book that thrums with a convert’s passion. What’s shocking for Mr. Pillsbury is the discovery that China’s ambition to become the world’s dominant power has been there all along, virtually burned into the country’s cultural DNA and hiding, as he says, in plain sight.
For most of recorded history, China had the world’s richest economy and boasted both hugely inventive technology and extraordinary cultural attainment. Its ideal, moreover, was supremacy over tianxia, or “everything under heaven” in imperial-era parlance, within a tribute-based international system.
This world was punctured, of course, in the 19th century with the imposition of European imperialism throughout Asia. But it took scarcely a decade in power for Mao Zedong to exhibit his civilization’s brash assertiveness, fighting the United States to a standstill in Korea, setting a short-term goal of economically surpassing Britain—however disastrously—and staring down his erstwhile patron, the Soviet Union.
In Mr. Pillsbury’s telling, the U.S. allowed itself to be utterly fooled by the man who replaced Mao, Deng Xiaoping, who seduced the Americans into training thousands of Chinese scientists in American universities during the Carter years in what he calls “the greatest outpouring of American scientific and technological expertise in history.” This was followed, under Presidents Reagan and Bush, by the military and intelligence cooperation that Mr. Pillsbury advocated, including providing China with detailed information about its main adversaries at the time, the Soviet Union and Vietnam, and ending the longstanding U.S. economic embargo. The grandfatherly Deng supposedly accomplished this through his pragmatic sensibility and earthy charm, which won him a place on Time magazine covers—as well as in the hearts of capitalists—with dreams of an immense, untapped Chinese market.
For years after Deng, the saying “hide your brilliance and bide your time,” attributed to the former “paramount leader,” served as soothing reassurance to many Western observers of China.
Somehow this was interpreted among Washington types, including the author, to mean that China saw no urgency in challenging the West and indeed might never do so.
Now the author sees that Deng’s dictum was a summons to self-discipline and cunning, aimed at helping China overcome anything standing on its path to restored pre-eminence. The saying, Mr. Pillsbury informs us, dates from a corpus of literature on statecraft from the first millennium B.C., when rival Chinese states prized deception above all as they jockeyed for supremacy. Over and over Mr. Pillsbury, who emphasizes his fluency in Mandarin and his ability to read and write the language, draws on abundant contemporary references to this era’s writing to argue that China sees today’s “multipolar world as merely a strategic waypoint en route to a new global hierarchy.”
At the heart of the strategy is an effort to “kill with a borrowed sword,” which means tapping the strength of an adversary for eventual use against it. Mr. Pillsbury cites warnings about such an approach that Washington received from Soviet defectors in the early 1960s, just as Beijing and Moscow were beginning their stormy divorce. Because of Mao’s impatience, the Chinese supposedly tipped their hand far too early, squandering the opportunity to drain the Soviets of more cheap resources and technology. Under its new leader, Xi Jinping , Beijing has been very assertive, but Mr. Pillsbury warns that it is nonetheless determined to keep Washington lulled until it has made off with everything valuable it can siphon from this open society and the international order it supports.
The U.S. is vulnerable to this strategy, Mr. Pillsbury says, because it has chronically underestimated the hawks lurking in the Chinese establishment. Even worse, he adds, we have no understanding of China’s strategic culture. One is tempted to concede point one, but this second assertion is simply not true. The Pentagon, academia and American think tanks have no shortage of specialists in China’s strategic culture, from Alastair Iain Johnston and Roger Ames to M. Taylor Fravel.
The author is correct to assert that China constitutes, by far, the biggest national challenge to America’s position in the world today, but its smug belief in the idea that it has mastered all the essentials of statecraft based on its own ritualized wars of 2,500 years ago is a poor reason for Americans to develop a complex. To the extent that it is true, it may even be to our advantage.
Mr. French teaches at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He is the author of “China’s Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa.”
章家敦说，特朗普政府内仍有坚持立场的官员，也有想跟中国谈成协议的官员，“他们愿意忽略中国的所作所为”。他说，5月初当中国交回了协议草案，反悔已经作出的承诺时“震惊了特朗普政府”，因为“他们发现中国在谈判中并没有诚意，或者中国根本就没准备好谈判，中国内部有太多的政治矛盾，习近平没有能力（not in the position）达成协议。因此，当你把所有这些放在一起，我肯定，比如，财政部长姆努钦还是想跟中国有一个协议，但是我肯定，他现在也比较为难了。”
您的意见
所有评论 (116)
习小学毕业文革保送的"工农兵大学生"和在职读的"马列博士"全是假的,他读秘书讲稿几十年,常用词"衷心""体系""难民"等已读万遍还记不住须注音于稿。可见他学识智商和能力极差神智病态,离开注音讲稿无法作报告。习如毛也从不即兴答记者问,更无法参于竞选辩论之类事,故他最怕民主制及媒体开放等,怕露馅淘汰下台。习和他父亲深受毛独裁制迫害,其父被毛整了16年险些送命。习文革时仅13岁就被关押批斗,饿逃回家求母做饭,其母却出去举报,惨不忍睹。蠢人高抬更虚荣,黑心下作乃本性,习思想被王沪宁愚弄向文革倒退,等同清算习父开创的改革开放,低级红里高级黑。川普咋总是说习是好友？因为习曾去过美国,好色私通美女间谍并签署加入特务代号为X53,这段大陆老大详细历史,美情报局绝对不会对总统隐瞞。有了这把柄,习怎可能拒绝川普为好友？或至少是道合仅志不同？川普总爱说的"好友"竟有如此惊世来由意味深长。也正因此,习夹在川普与三朝罪恶元凶全球恐怖总头目王沪宁之间,内外交困,左右为难,晕头转向,神志失常,命难长矣(祥请搜索:郝雪森6.29