Does China Have a Secret Plan to Take America S Place?

Asia Society Interview by Orville Schell http://asiasociety.org/video/chinas-hundred-year-marathon-michael-pillsbury- complete CSPAN http://www.c-span.org/video/?324153-1/book-discussion-hundredyear-marathon PBS http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/china-secret-plan-take-americas-place/ Does China have a secret plan to take America’s place? February 25, 2015 at 6:25 PM EDT In the bestselling but controversial new book "The Hundred-Year Marathon," author and former Pentagon official Michael Pillsbury argues that China is angling to replace the United States as a global superpower. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner interviews Pillsbury about what he thinks the U.S. can do to counteract the “secret strategy.” TRANSCRIPT RELATED LINKS  U.S. files case against China over subsidizing export industry  To speed up economy, China’s central bank makes borrowing cheaper  Host of challenges ahead for new defense secretary GWEN IFILL: Now to a controversial warning about China from a new bestselling book that’s becoming a lightning rod for criticism. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner explains. MARGARET WARNER: Since the 1970s, Michael Pillsbury has focused on China, as a Pentagon official and consultant and now at the conservative Hudson Institute. Over the years, the Mandarin speaker has grown ever more hard-line in his views, and it is clear in his bestselling, but controversial new book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.” He says it’s based on Chinese and American documents and books and conversations with Chinese military officials and defectors. Critics have shot back, accusing him of sloppy use of evidence. I spoke with Pillsbury last week. The very title of your book asserts that America has been in denial, that China has a secret strategy to replace the United States. What is that strategy based on? MICHAEL PILLSBURY, Author, “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”: The strategy is based on two things, first, China’s historical role in what we would today call the leader of the world. They want to restore themselves to the role they played for 2,000 years. The second part of the strategy is, they know from their economists that they can’t build China into a replacement for us by themselves. They have got to get certain things from the outside world, and they have worked very hard in the last 30 years to get those things. MARGARET WARNER: And is that so surprising? MICHAEL PILLSBURY: It’s surprising because they have denied publicly such an ambition. They portray themselves as weak, backward, and in great need of assistance from us. MARGARET WARNER: And the United States has been a very willing partner in assisting them. MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Yes, because of false assumptions. We thought, going back 30 or 40 years ago, if China becomes prosperous, the middle class will demand democracy, and so we’re looking at a country that, yes, was stronger, but it has our values. That didn’t happen. That’s what I call the greatest intelligence failure in our history. MARGARET WARNER: But there are other countries in the world that consider themselves great historical powers and want to restore that greatness. What makes China, as you portray it, so malevolent or so inimical to U.S. interests? MICHAEL PILLSBURY: I think it’s the unreformed China that I’m worried about. They plan to keep the Communist Party structure, the approach to human rights, the approach to pollution. They plan to keep all that and become the dominant economic power. This is what I’m warning against. MARGARET WARNER: But wasn’t it inevitable, given China’s size and its resources, its population, that it was bound to grow by leaps and bounds? It didn’t need the United States for that. MICHAEL PILLSBURY: No, they did need us from for that. It’s very clear from their own writings. They believe that roughly half their growth over the last 30 years was brought about by favorable terms of trade and investment from America. We’re crucial to their strategy. MARGARET WARNER: Now, you yourself made a personal evolution. You say you used to be what’s known in the trade as a panda hugger. MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Yes. Well, a panda hugger, that I was before, is someone who uncritically just wants to help and support China, has a sense of the old — what I call the old narrative. I came to realize I had been wrong from the beginning about who was really managing whom in this relationship. We have, I hate to say been their pawns because we have got a lot of benefit from our trade with China and our investment. And they have made some enormous progress. But I think, overall, the Chinese are managing us much better than we are managing China. MARGARET WARNER: Now, people who have looked at this book criticize it for relying way too much on the view of the hawks inside the defense and intelligence and military establishments, and that there are many other competing voices in the Chinese establishment. Aren’t there? MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Yes, that criticism is valid. But the rise of the hawks has happened. It’s a fact. President Xi Jinping shows more attention to them, has involved them more in his deliberations, goes to meet with them in person. So, I think the rise of the hawks that I’m claiming has taken place is not up for debate. It’s happened for sure. Other civilians are involved, too. It’s not just the military. They have a much more nationalistic view that China should speak out and really be something now, and not wait until 2049. MARGARET WARNER: So, now, what would a Chinese-led global order look like that is detrimental to U.S. interests? MICHAEL PILLSBURY: The Chinese concept of the new global order, they say in very pleasing language, will be fair. The south and the poor countries of the world, there will be no pressure anymore against dictators, that issues of a global nature, like climate change, pollution in general, these matters will be handled by consensus, not by pressure groups from what they perceive as, you know, unusual concern with American values. That will all be gone. The key point about the new Chinese-led global order is America will not be a global leader. The removal of the United States as what they call the hegemon is the most important thing. So the new order itself is just going to have no American leadership. That’s the fundamental point. MARGARET WARNER: There is a counterview, which is the U.S. and China are now the world’s two biggest economies, and if we enter into a period of conflict with them, we do so at our own peril. MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Well, it’s true. We want to cooperate with China, but what I’m arguing is a little bit different. I’m saying we need to be shaping China at the same time as they’re shaping us. They have enormous influence in our political system, with our businessmen. There’s no reason we can’t try to have the same kind of influence in Beijing. MARGARET WARNER: So if the United States wants to forestall this, being replaced as the global superpower, what does it most need to do? MICHAEL PILLSBURY: We need to strengthen organizations that are dedicated to shaping China. We have to wake up that the Chinese are not poor and backward anymore, and it’s time to shape them. But, secondly, we are falling behind in almost all the competitiveness indicators there are. We have got to get our own house in order first, or the Chinese are going to win the marathon by default. MARGARET WARNER: Michael Pillsbury, thank you.

 Arts  Books  Bookshelf Panda Hugger Turned Slugger For years, Pillsbury’s view fit the Washington consensus: China, with the help of the U.S., would become a peaceful power. No longer. By Howard W. French Updated Feb. 26, 2015 9:44 p.m. ET 13 COMMENTS 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.” ENLARGE Photo: The Wall Street Journal The Hundred-Year Marathon By Michael Pillsbury (Henry Holt, 319 pages, $30) 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. Related Video Hudson Institute Director of Chinese Studies Michael Pillsbury on his new book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon,” and Beijing’s quest to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant military power. Photo credit: Getty Images. 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.”

Defense News http://www.defensenews.com/story/defensenews/blog/intercepts/2015/01/27/china-us-taiwan-strategy-superpower- marathon-100/22390029/ Book Review: The Hundred-Year Marathon Wendell Minnick, 10:23 a.m. EST January 27, 2015

(Photo: Michael Pillsbury) 39 CONNECT 25 TWEET 21 LINKEDINCOMMENTEMAILMORE Book Review: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower , by Michael Pillsbury. Release Date: February 3, 2015. Reviewed by Wendell Minnick, Asia Bureau Chief TAIPEI - Defense News was given a sneak peek at the manuscript of Michael Pillsbury's new book, "The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower", due for public release on February 3. This book is a mixed genre of memoir, analysis, and history. The author, and it is indeed Pillsbury (I can hear his voice in my head when I read it), uses the first-person in much of the book. Pillsbury describes his involvement in US-China government issues, relating his ties with the CIA, FBI, and Pentagon over a 40- year career of China-watching. In many ways, it is shameless self-promotion as Pillsbury inserts himself into history with redundant "I, me, my" injects throughout the text. Those interested in a far more critical analysis of Pillsbury's modus operandi can go no further than Soyoung Ho's "Panda Slugger" in the Washington Monthly in the July/August 2006 issue. One central thesis of this book is that the hawks in China have successfully persuaded the Chinese leadership to view the U.S. as a dangerous hegemon that it must replace. Pillsbury claims it took the artsy firebombing of a Christmas tree at Washington's National Mall to raise his curiosity as to why the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery was honoring famed Chinese artist Cai Guo Qiang, who designed the bizarre fireworks display in November 2012. It further baffled Pillsbury as to why then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was presenting the same man with a gold medal and a check of $250,000, courtesy of the taxpayers, for an event dubbed the "Black Christmas Tree." The debris from the event, which he witnessed, took two months to clean up. "I don't know if any of the guests contemplated why they were watching a Chinese artist blow up a symbol of the Christian faith in the middle of the nation's capital less than a month before Christmas," but it is obvious the event caused him to rethink America's relationship with China. Begging to know more about Cai, Pillsbury went to work digging through Chinese-language websites and archives trying to learn more about the artist. What he discovered further infuriated him. "The artist raised eyebrows when he said that the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001, was a 'spectacle' for the world audience, as if it were – in some twisted sense – a work of art." Pillsbury further discovered that Cai had proclaimed that his favorite book was "Unrestricted Warfare: War and Strategy in the Globalization Era, a work of military analysis in which two Chinese colonels recommended that Beijing 'use asymmetrical warfare, including terrorism, to attack the United States.'" Pillsbury concludes that Americans must finally come to grips with a clear understanding of what China has in store for us. In addition, this must begin by facing down false assumptions America has with China. False Assumption #1 Engagement Brings Complete Cooperation For four decades now, Pillsbury claims that he and many China watchers in Washington believed that "engagement" with the Chinese would induce Beijing to cooperate with the West on a wide range of policy problems. Well, it has been a failure. Trade and technology were supposed to lead to a convergence of Chinese and Western views on questions of regional and global order. This has also flopped. In short, China has failed to meet nearly all of our rose expectations. Instead, China has done everything it can to thwart reconstruction efforts and economic development in Afghanistan, it has provided support to anti- Western groups in Sudan, Iran, North Korea, and the Taliban. False Assumption #2 China is on the Road to Democracy There is no evidence China is moving towards democracy and that the Chinese Communist Party is on the verge on extinction. China is moving towards "authoritarian resilience" and the Party could survive for decades without change. False Assumption #3 China, The Fragile Flower Many China watchers have expressed worry that if the United States pressed China too hard to have elections, free dissidents, to extend the rule of law, and to threat ethnic minorities fairly, then this pressure would lead to the collapse of the Chinese state – causing chaos throughout Asia. The worst parts of the Bible. Yet the fact is that China's already robust GDP is predicted to continue to grow by at least 7 or 8 percent, thereby surpassing that of the United States by 2018 at the earliest. "While we worried about China's woes, its economy more than doubled." False Assumption #4 China Wants to Be – And Is – Just Like Us "In our hubris, Americans love to believe that the aspiration of every other country is to be just like the United States." There is no evidence in today's China that they seek to match and mirror our society. However, Chinese visitors will often cite their love for our country and a deep interest in our culture and lifestyles, Pillsbury warns that Chinese literature and writings indicate this is based on a strategy of deception. "Whereas Americans tended to favor direct action, those of Chinese ethnic origin were found to favor the indirect over the direct, ambiguity and deception over clarity and transparency." False Assumption #5 China's Hawks Are Weak Pillsbury claims that over time he discovered proposals by Chinese hawks (ying pai) to the Chinese leadership to mislead and manipulate American policymakers to obtain intelligence and military, technology, and economic assistance. The hawks have been advising Chinese leaders since Mao Zedong to avenge a century of humiliation by the West and to supplant the West as the next global economic, military, and political power. According to Pillsbury, the plan has become known as "the Hundred-Year Marathon" from 1949 to 2049. "The goal is to avenge or wipe-clean (xi xue) past foreign humiliations." Then China will set up a world order that will be fair to China, a world without American global supremacy, and revise the U.S.-dominated economic and geopolitical world order founded at Bretton Woods at the end of World War II. What Pillsbury must confess to is that he was very much a supporter of all five of these assumptions over most of his career. He claimed that he wore the "panda hugger" badge of honor for decades. The term "panda hugger" ("red team") is often ascribed to a person who serves as an apologist of China's more diabolical activities and policies. Pillsbury does not reveal the opposite, which is known as a "dragon- slayer" or "panda slugger" ("blue team"). Pillsbury is convinced that after decades of studying China, these hard-line views are not fringe, but are very much in the mainstream of Chinese geostrategic thought. The strength of the Hundred-Year Marathon, however, is that it operates through stealth. To borrow from the movie Fight Club, the first rule of the Marathon is that you do not talk about the Marathon. But the Chinese are beginning to talk about the notion more openly – perhaps because they realize it may already be too late for America to keep pace, he writes. When the U.S. economy was battered during the global financial crisis of 2008, the Chinese believed America's long-anticipated and unrecoverable decline was beginning. Now with a new robust leader in power in Beijing, President Xi Jinping, all the assumptions of America's China apologists could be coming to an abrupt end. Like John F. Kennedy, Xi has a "China dream" that places a resurgent China at the rightful top of the global hierarchy. Xi has picked up the hawk's mantra of fuxing zhi lu or "the road to renewal." Pillsbury believes that after China achieves a win on the economic marathon, it will push towards a win in the military marathon in what could be a four-to-one military advantage over the U.S. "The world's largest economy will need a force more powerful than any other – one that would eventually render American military power obsolete." Pillsbury looks to the Warring States Period of Chinese history as the template for today's hawks in Beijing. The nine principle elements of Chinese strategy include the following: 1. Induce complacency to avoid alerting your opponent. 2. Manipulate your opponent's advisers. "Such efforts have been a hallmark of China's relations with the United States." 3. Be patient – for decades, or longer – to achieve victory. 4. Steal your opponent's ideas and technology for strategic purposes. 5. Military might is not the critical factor for winning a long-term competition. "This partly explains why China has not devoted more resources to developing larger, more powerful military forces. Rather than relying on a brute accumulation of strength, Chinese strategy advocates targeting an enemy's weak points and biding one's time." 6. Recognize that the hegemon will take extreme, even reckless action to retain its dominant position. Pillsbury writes that in today's context – "the United States will not go quietly into the night as its power declines relative to others." 7. Never lose sight of shi. Pillsbury writes that the two elements of shi are critical components of Chinese strategy: "deceiving others into doing your bidding for you, and waiting for the point of maximum opportunity to strike." 8. Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers. "Chinese strategy places a high premium on assessing China's relative power, during peacetime and in the event of war, across a plethora of dimensions beyond just military considerations. The United States, by contrast, has never attempted to do this." 9. Always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others. "In what could be characterized as a deeply ingrained sense of paranoia, China's leaders believe that because all other potential rivals are out to deceive them, China must respond with its own duplicity." To further emphasis his points that the hawks are dangerous, Pillsbury said that while studying Mandarin as a young man, "we memorized a well-known proverb intended to sum up Chinese history: wai ru , nei fa (on the outside, be benevolent; on the inside, be ruthless)." He writes that the reason the Warring States Period is a perfect metaphor for today is that the period began with a tale of two neighboring kingdoms, one rising [China], one falling [U.S.] in relative power. The victor wins the war after the enemy asks the strength of his armory, which reveals his intent to attack him. The lesson is famous, he writes, "never ask the weight of the emperor's cauldron's." In other words, do not let the enemy know you are a rival, until it is too late for him to stop you. "On the international level, if you are a rising power, you must manipulate the perceptions of the dominant world power to not be destroyed by it," Pillsbury writes. China rejects the idea common in the Western world that mercantilism has been rendered obsolete by the success of free markets and free trade. Instead, China embraces mercantilism by maintaining a system of high tariffs, gaining direct control of natural resources, and protection of domestic manufacturing, all designed to build up China's monetary reserves. Additionally, the Chinese intelligence service routinely steals technology and competitive information to assist its corporate leaders. In the U.S., it is deemed unethical and often illegal for the CIA to provide American corporations with intelligence to increase the nation's economic growth. "In my forty years in the U.S. government, I have never heard of a case in which the U.S. intelligence community was tasked to attempt to increase America's GDP in such a way. Pillsbury suggests that CIA translator and Chinese double-agent Larry Wu-Tai Chin provided Beijing "countless classified U.S. documents regarding China to the Chinese government" and paved the way for Beijing to best facilitate Nixon's secret negotiations to their advantage. The book also overviews the various joint covert military cooperation between China and the U.S. over the past fifty years, including a joint signal intelligence program along the Soviet border, supplying Chinese weapons to CIA-backed rebels in Angola, Cambodia, and Afghanistan during the 1980s. Pillsbury and colleagues were concerned Chinese weapons could be used by Afghan rebels for commando raids into Soviet territory. However, Pillsbury was "taken aback at the ruthlessness of Beijing's ambition" when Chinese officials said that it was not a problem. CIA lawyers were against the raids arguing it could result in "outright assassination" and that the local CIA station chief "might end up in handcuffs." Therefore, commando raids into Soviet territory were killed, even though they were "favored by the Chinese as a way to bring down the Russian hegemon." The Chinese viewed them as a "useful psychological shock effect on the declining hegemon." Pillsbury introduces the reader to a variety of Chinese defectors who gave insights into Beijing's strategic thinking, one of which he dubs as "Mr. White" and "Ms. Green." White revealed broad plans by Beijing for sweeping promotion campaigns that would boost nationalism and eradicate any further Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. style protests, debates over the positive aspects of democracy, and question Party leadership. White revealed that since Tiananmen all Chinese textbooks have been rewritten to depict the U.S. as a hegemon that, for more than 150 years, has stifled China's rise and destroyed the "soul of Chinese civilianization." This reeducation is innocuously dubbed the "National Patriotic Education Program." China also uses the Confucius Institutes located in American universities to promote positive views of China and discourage discussion about Taiwan, Tibet, and the Tiananmen Square massacre. Unfortunately, Pillsbury said the U.S. intelligence community quickly dismissed Mr. White's insights in favor of Ms. Green's. Opposed to Mr. White, who asked for nothing in exchange for his views, Ms. Green demanded $2 million. She asserted the hawks were "fringe thinkers, out of the mainstream, quite elderly, and rapidly losing what little influence they still had." Unlike Mr. White, she did not reveal the names of any Chinese spies in the U.S., but too many people in the intelligence community found her convincing as she supported a growing consensus that China was a struggling nation in need of American understanding, as it became a mature and productive partner in international affairs. Pillsbury makes one mistake that leads to Ms. Green's identification to the reader. Though he never mentions her name, he does give the date of her arrest for working as a double agent for China – April 9, 2003 – the same day that Katrina Leung (aka Parlor Maid) was arrested. Leung single-handedly destroyed the FBI's China counterintelligence section, according to David Wise's 2011 book on the scandal, "Tiger Trap: America's Secret War with China." The mismanagement of the FBI's counter-intelligence section is also well documented in two unclassified US Justice Department reports, "A Review of the FBI's Handling and Oversight of FBI Asset Katrina Leung" (2006), and "A Review of the FBI's Progress in Responding to the Recommendations in the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) Report on the FBI's Handling and Oversight of Katrina Leung" (2013). The 2006 report revealed that her FBI handlers had both been involved in romantic trysts. Over an 18-year period the FBI paid her $1.7 million before discovering she was a double agent. According to the 2013 document, "The OIG found that the FBI was aware of serious counterintelligence concerns about Leung, but did little to follow up on the warning signals." In exchange for her cooperation, Leung never served any prison time for her actions and continues to live in the United States. Pillsbury calls for the FBI to release classified damage reports on her activities, and until that happens, "the public cannot know which was worse – the secrets she gave China or the reassurances she gave Americans." Chinese propaganda efforts in the U.S. are extraordinary. Chinese companies are providing money to U.S. think tanks, academic institutions, lobbying firms, and individuals who can trumpet China's message that it is a rising power in need of understanding and patience. There are 350 Confucius Institutes on college campuses around America. Agreements between the Institutes and individual universities are labeled secret and non-disclosure, which is a significant event in the transparent world of academia. China uses four strategies to influence U.S. media organizations to report positive stories about China, writes Pillsbury. These include: - Direct action by Chinese diplomats, local officials, security forces, and regulators, both inside and outside China. These measures obstruct news gathering, prevent the publication of undesirable content, and punish overseas media outlets that fail to heed restrictions. - Employing economic carrots and sticks to induce self-censorship among media owners and their outlets located outside mainland China. - Applying indirect pressure via proxies – including advertisers, satellite firms, and foreign governments – who take action to prevent or punish the publication of content critical of Beijing. - Conducting cyberattacks and physical assaults that are not conclusively traceable to the central Chinese authorities but serve the Party's aims. One strategy of concern for Pillsbury is China's development of "Assassins Mace" strategies, which are a David and Goliath approach using asymmetrical warfare. These include cyber warfare, jamming enemy communications, directed-energy weapons, electromagnetic pulse weapons, smart bombs, anti-radar systems, electronic warfare, anti-satellite weapons, and anti-ship ballistic missiles (dubbed "aircraft carrier killers"). Later in the book, Pillsbury writes that China has begun to build "parasitic microsatellites," which are small devices that would "cling to an American satellite and either disable it or hijack the information it gathers." Pillsbury believes that China is prepared to use what it calls a "warning strike" that would increase shi and tilt the flow of events in China's favor. "While China has historically not used force for territorial conquest, it has instead done so for political motives of a different sort: to achieve psychological shock, reverse a crisis situation, or establish a fait accompli," as evidenced in surprise offenses in Korea (1950), India (1962), Soviet Union (1969), and Vietnam (1979). "Today, the greatest likelihood of military confrontation between the United States and China may come through a similar misunderstanding, and a calculation by Chinese leaders that a shock strike will not lead to a broader escalation." On China's senior political decision-making system, Pillsbury, quoting Robert Suettinger, a longtime CIA analyst, writes it is "opaque, noncommunicative, distrustful, rigidly bureaucratic, inclined to deliver what they think leaders want to hear, and strategically dogmatic." Pillsbury projects to the year 2049. To a world the U.S. no longer leads. China's economy is three times that of the U.S. The U.S. dollar is no longer the leading currency, sharing space with the Euro and the Renminbi. China's military will outspend the U.S. on weapons and influence. "It will be able to exert over its neighbors and allies the robust influence that America has enjoyed for decades." Pillsbury makes numerous recommendations for the U.S. government to implement. - Keep Track of Your Gifts – every year the U.S. taxpayer provides a variety of programs and assistance to China. Much of this aid is low profile and unnoticed by the media. "This is done intentionally." There is no available accounting of all the activities funded by the U.S. taxpayer that aid China. "Not only is America funding its own chief opponent; it doesn't even keep track of how much is being spent to do it." He suggests the U.S. Congress enact an annual reporting requirement of all agencies and departments of their assistance to China. - Find Common Ground At Home – A coalition should be formed in the U.S. with the common mission of bringing change to China and altering a harmful and outdated U.S. approach to promoting reform in Beijing. "This means that Americans who champion the Dalai Lama should ally with U.S. defense experts who promote spending for the Pentagon's AirSea Battle program." He also suggests that human rights advocates should work with American businesses to protect intellectual property. - Build a Vertical Coalition of Nations – The U.S. should build an alliance amongst nations in the Asia- Pacific that give China "pause and temper its bellicosity" particularly in the South China Sea and East China Sea. - Protect the Political Dissidents – During the Cold War the U.S. safeguarded and promoted the idealism and aspirations of dissidents who had escaped the Soviet Union and East Bloc. The same should be done for Chinese dissidents who escape and those who remain in prisons. The U.S. President should tie China's human rights achievements to issues Beijing cares about, such as trade relations. Pillsbury is critical of President Obama's handling of this issue. "The Obama administration did not even include human rights in the Strategic and Economic Dialogue, the establishment of which was announced in April 2009 by President Obama and President Hu Jintao." - Support Prodemocracy Reformers – Returning to the Cold War example, Pillsbury writes that the U.S. should revive support for democratic and civil society groups within China. "China's concern when it talks about a new Cold War is that the Americans will revive their Cold War-era programs that helped to subvert the Soviet Union from within by using the power of ideas."

Washington Monthly Panda Slugger The dubious scholarship of Michael Pillsbury, the China hawk with Rumsfeld's ear. By Soyoung Ho

In May 2002, ten months before he became president of China, Hu Jintao visited Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. The meeting, as then-Vice President Hu saw it, had gone well. Routine U.S.-Chinese military-to- military contacts, which had been suspended since 2001 after a tense standoff over a damaged U.S. spy plane, were to be renewed. China's Xinhua news agency quickly put out a headline announcing the thaw: "Chinese vice-president, U.S. defense secretary agree to resume military exchanges." But there was a problem. According to the Pentagon, no such consensus had been reached. Instead, the two sides had merely agreed that the possibility of such exchanges would be "revisited." The mix-up, as it turned out, had a likely explanation. According to The Far Eastern Economic Review, Rumsfeld, in a characteristic interdepartmental snub, had barred the State Department's interpreter from the meeting. The man on whose language skills Rumsfeld had instead relied was not a professional interpreter but a Pentagon advisor and longtime Washington operator named Michael Pillsbury. With a proficiency (up to a point) in Mandarin, a doctorate in political science from Columbia University, and three decades of experience in dealing with the Chinese military, Pillsbury has emerged as a Defense Department favorite. That he may inadvertently have caused Hu to leave Washington with an overly conciliatory picture was also ironic: Pillsbury is one of Washington's foremost China hawks, consistently warning that Beijing represents a more serious and rapidly growing military threat than other China experts believe. The Wall Street Journal took notice of Pillsbury last year in a front-page story that described him as "one of the Pentagon's most influential advisers on China, with a direct line to many of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's top aides." The story observed that China, too, has been "keeping tabs on Mr. Pillsbury." For good reason: Thanks in part to Pillsbury's influence, the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR--the blueprint for future defense strategy and spending--identifies China as the nation with "the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States." And the Pentagon's most recent annual report to Congress on China's military contains passages that appear to be lifted directly out of Pillsbury's writings, including warnings of "asymmetric programs" in the works. This can get expensive. The Wall Street Journal recently reported "the Pentagon now cites China as justification for a range of proposed procurements, most notably a new, multibillion-dollar long-range bomber program." While Pillsbury has achieved prominence within the Defense Secretary's office, many defense experts within the military, government agencies, and universities reject his scholarship as tendentious at best, and their professional distaste is heightened by personal dislike. "Brilliant" and "charming" are words frequently used by acquaintances to describe Pillsbury, but so are "combative," "conspiratorial," and "ruthless." His career has been one of numerous short-lived jobs, at least three dismissals, and a revoked security clearance. For hardliners in the Bush administration, however, having a combative, conspiratorial, or ruthless personality isn't exactly a drawback. Rather, it is seen as a desirable quality in an administration that has been in an almost constant state of war with expert consensus, which it sees as a fortress of liberal bias and as a hindrance to bold action. Still, even if the White House might prefer to operate solely on instinct, administration officials need experts inside and outside of government to help them set strategy, to lace their speeches with supportive factoids, to win arguments in inner-agency battles with opponents, to produce studies purportedly showing that all the other experts are wrong ("Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life."), and to speak to journalists looking for "both sides" of a debate. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, eccentric experts on the Middle East dominated administration thinking, but most are now back on the outside of policy. "The Middle East is just a blip," explained a 2005 Atlantic Monthly article headlined "How We Would Fight China" by Robert D. Kaplan. China is the new long-term game, and Pillsbury is the neocons' successor, the latest Cassandra with Rumsfeld's ear. Unfortunately, this is a White House with an unenviable record of picking its Cassandras. The right ones (Eric Shinseki) have often been ignored in favor of the wrong ones (Ahmed Chalabi). And the consequences have been serious. But which Cassandra is Michael Pillsbury? Out-hawking the hawks In person, Pillsbury, a blue-eyed, consciously polished figure in his early sixties, is a combination of charm and caginess. At a recent meeting at a Corner Bakery in downtown Washington, D.C., he sipped lowfat milk and genially fended off questions about his work. He attributes negative press such as the story about his mistranslation between Rumsfeld and Hu to rumors spread by "panda huggers" (a pejorative term for those who take a more benign view of Beijing). "I try to focus on a topic that no one focuses on," he says, contrasting himself to his peers. "It's mainly the future, more than five years ahead, sometimes 10 years ahead." Actually, scores of China experts within the military, the intelligence community, and the academy devote their lives precisely to assessing the Chinese military and its possible impact on U.S. interests over the next five or 10 years. Nearly all have arrived at the same conclusion: that China's military is nowhere close to being a credible threat to the United States or its interests. China's military technology is widely considered to be about 20 years behind that of the United States, and its defense expenditures (even if its official numbers are tripled, which some say must be done to capture China's full investment) are less than a fifth of those of the United States, which spends nearly half a trillion dollars per year. The defense budgets of South Korea and Japan are each bigger than that of China, too. To be sure, China, thanks to its growing economic might, has been modernizing its armed forces rapidly. But so has the United States, which currently spends $70 billion per year on defense R&D alone (higher than the defense R&D budgets of the rest of the world combined). As Admiral William Fallon, head of the U.S. Pacific Command, recently told The Wall Street Journal, "Technologically, we are far and away more sophisticated than they [the Chinese] are, and they know it." If China were to have any serious capacity to project power beyond its shores, it would need what any great power has: aircraft carriers. As Fred Kaplan points out in Slate, though, China has only two (used ones purchased from the U.S.S.R.), which are being used not as weapons platforms but, in the Pentagon's own words, as "floating military theme parks." Some experts think that China might have one combat-ready carrier by 2015. When assessing threats, security experts look not only at capacity but also at intent. (Great Britain could incinerate U.S. cities with nuclear weapons, for example, but this has cost us little sleep.) Here, the debate becomes more heated. All agree that China harbors considerable nationalist sentiment, has its eyes on Taiwan, and has shown a willingness to behave mercilessly towards its dissidents, but they disagree over whether this translates into plans to challenge or outdo the United States militarily. Some, such as Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, take a sanguine view widely shared within the uniformed military. "There are lots of countries in the world that have the capacity to wage war," Pace said in a 2005 press conference. "Very few have the intent to do so. And, clearly, we have a complex but good relationship with China. So there's absolutely no reason for us to believe there's any intent on their part." Some take a darker view. And many simply say there's no telling what China hopes to do and, for now, little point in trying. Many things can happen in twenty years. China may become the next Soviet Union. Or its economy might collapse. Or it might become a democracy. Convenient as it may be to lock in one's enemies in advance, the world doesn't work that way. The debate over intent has led to different policymaking recommendations. Experts advocating a tougher stance argue that China is more likely to restrain itself in the decades ahead in response to overwhelming displays of force today. To that end, they support increased deployments of forces to the Pacific and more spending on weapons. They also press for a "hedging strategy" of building alliances with China's neighbors, such as Japan and India, should relations with the Middle Kingdom go sour. This, for the most part, has been the approach of the Bush administration. Those counseling restraint argue that China already has a keen sense of U.S. military superiority. An overtly aggressive posture against a potential long-term threat, they say, will only convince China to become hostile and make it less likely to cooperate on the real, immediate threats posed by Iran and North Korea. Many also warn against using China as an excuse to spend precious defense dollars on weapons we may not need, especially since the United States is, at least indirectly, borrowing money to build them from the Chinese. On this spectrum of opinion, Pillsbury dwells on the far-hawkish end. Where others view China's intentions as complicated, Pillsbury says that Beijing views the United States as an "inevitable foe." ("He makes simple what is not simple," says Mark Pratt, a former State Department official who has known Pillsbury for over 30 years.) Where others debate the merits of hedging, Pillsbury feels that things haven't gone far enough. "The U.S. can do much more to hedge in the next few years if the Chinese do not end their excessive military secrecy and begin to reassure their neighbors," he recently told The Wall Street Journal. And where nearly everyone agrees that China is far behind the United States in military capacity, Pillsbury has been among the first, and the few, to argue that Beijing is preparing for an asymmetric military conflict with the United States in which it would draw on secret "assassin's mace" weapons. The term "assassin's mace," more commonly translated as "trump card" (shashoujian) is, according to Pillsbury, integral to a Chinese notion of "inferior defeats superior." (The Pentagon's most recent annual report to Congress on China's military from May 2006 includes the term, mentioning Chinese efforts to exploit "perceived vulnerabilities of potential opponents--so-called Assassin's Mace [sha shou jian] programs.") An "assassin's mace" might take the form of a computer application, for instance, that would take over an enemy information system, rendering a foe the victim of his own dependence on technology. In Pillsbury's telling, China intends to leapfrog ahead in battle readiness by using assassin's-mace weapons to find breaches in U.S. armor. Moreover, he implies, they could be ready at any time. Broken China Pillsbury wasn't always a hardliner on China. As an undergraduate at Stanford in the 1960s, he was so taken with Chinese culture that he decided to make a career of it. In the 1970s, he enrolled as a graduate student at Columbia University and took a job at the Rand Corporation. His first moment of fame would come in 1975, when he published an article in Foreign Policy suggesting that China and the U.S. establish military-to-military relations as a counter to the Soviet Union. Many old-school anti-communists objected, but then- Governor Ronald Reagan was among those who were impressed. The Gipper even sent Pillsbury a handwritten letter of praise. In 1978, Pillsbury went into government, taking a job as a Republican staff assistant to the Senate Budget Committee. He soon found allies among the Senate's more conservative members, such as Jesse Helms and Orrin Hatch, but he also made enemies. Prior to his death this year, John Carbaugh, a former Senate staffer, told The Washington Monthly that he had been investigated for a leak in 1980 that had actually come from Pillsbury. "He went after me," said Carbaugh. "I was just blind-sided." (Pillsbury denies the story.) Holding on to employment was something else. His first job ended after only five months, when Pillsbury traveled to Japan and told his hosts that the U.S. ambassador was "not in touch" with Congress. ("Not only did I not say it, but I took written notes at every meeting," Pillsbury complained to AP after his firing.) By 1981, Pillsbury had managed to secure a spot as acting director of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA), but this post, too, lasted only a few months. (A Reagan official told the trade journal Aviation Week & Space Technology that Pillsbury had been a "loose cannon" who'd acted "contrary to Administration policy.") In 1986, Pillsbury achieved his most prominent dismissal yet, when he was let go as assistant undersecretary of defense for leaking to reporters that the administration had begun to supply the resistance in Afghanistan and Angola with Stinger missiles. (Pillsbury denied the allegations.) But Pillsbury kept coming back, amassing a record for recovery that would exhaust even the most diligent phoenix. Weeks after his 1986 firing, he was back working for four senators--Orrin Hatch, Jesse Helms, Gordon J. Humphrey, and Chic Hecht--as an advisor on foreign-policy issues. The meltdown of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International in 1991 should probably have ended Pillsbury's career. According to a report released by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1992, he had developed close ties to BCCI frontman Mohammed Hammoud, a Lebanese Shi'ite millionaire, meeting with him "ten to twenty times" in cities around the world and accepting money from him. The report explained: According to Pillsbury, Hammoud paid him an advance to coauthor a scholarly text about the Shi'ites... However, Pillsbury refused to disclose the amount he had been paid by Hammoud, and when the payment was made. Pillsbury argued that these facts were irrelevant since he ultimately returned the money, although he refused to specify when that occurred. Pillsbury stated that his expenses had never been paid by either Hammoud or BCCI. However, these statements are contradicted by notes taken by BCCI's lawyer ... The report also found that Pillsbury, when BCCI began to totter, had written to the public relations firm of Hill and Knowlton "offering to be of assistance to BCCI in its public relations efforts." By the late 1990s, though, BCCI was a dim memory, and Pillsbury a changed man--at least as far as China was concerned. A Sinophile no more, Pillsbury spoke of having been shocked by the Tiananmen killings in 1989 and appalled by anti-American sentiment among Chinese officials. His timing was good. Anti-China sentiment was running high in Washington, with Republican lawmakers depicting the White House as soft on Beijing and Regnery Publishing releasing books like Year of the Rat: How Bill Clinton Compromised American Security for Chinese Money. For Pillsbury, who'd spent the Clinton years bouncing in relative obscurity as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council of the United States and as an associate fellow at the National Defense University, knowing something about China represented a way to get back in the game. Soon, he had emerged as part of an unofficial but powerful Washington group called the Blue Team. Composed of leading anti-China conservatives, the Blue Team (the name comes from a common code designation, red versus blue, for the sides in war games) was dedicated to persuading lawmakers on the Hill to take a harder line against China. And, meanwhile, Pillsbury, with the backing of long-time mentor Andrew Marshall, head of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, released two books: Chinese Views of Future Warfare, in 1997, and China Debates the Future Security Environment, in 2000. They painted a picture of a self-confident China eagerly anticipating the decline of U.S. "To make incorrect judgments by sending disinformation" In Pillsbury's view, the crucial attribute that separates him from his peers is an ability to think farther ahead. "What you find with my colleagues is they say they don't need to worry about the future," he says. Some of Pillsbury's supporters agree. "In Washington, at times, people are risk-averse and have groupthink," says Randall Schriver, an East Asia specialist at the State Department until 2005. "But Pillsbury feels unbounded by conventional thinking. He thinks long- term, strategically." Derek Leebaert, professor in the government department at Georgetown University, calls Pillsbury "one of the few serious scholars in national security," adding that many others "at the top are barely qualified." But the true difference between most experts and Michael Pillsbury appears to lie somewhere else: namely, in the scholarship. With the exception of Chinese Views of Future Warfare, which is a straightforward compilation of translated essays, Pillsbury's work over the past decade has become increasingly speculative and dubious. In particular, a close examination of his writings reveals a troubling approach to evidence and primary sources. A case in point is Pillsbury's paper "China's Military Strategy Toward the U.S.: A View from Open Sources" from November of 2001. The piece names numerous Chinese military writings, including an article entitled "Twenty-first Century Naval Warfare" by Naval Captain Shen Zhongchang, Naval Lieutenant Commander Zhang Haiying, and Naval Lieutenant Zhou Xinsheng of the Chinese Navy Research Institute. According to Pillsbury, the article is written to show "how China could adopt several asymmetrical approaches to defeating a larger and more powerful navy," and one of them "will be for China to attack American naval command and information systems." (Underlined boldface Pillsbury's.) But Pillsbury's footnotes lead to an essay that never discusses how China fits into future naval warfare, much less any sort of hypothetical attack on the United States. (The essay even appears in Pillsbury's 1997 book, translated into English.) Later in his report, Pillsbury takes on another essay by the same authors and does something similar: In an article entitled "The Military Revolution in Naval Warfare," Captain Shen Zhongchang and his co- authors list new technologies that will contribute to the defeat of the United States.... The American system may not be so safe from attack. But the original essay makes no reference to how China might defeat the United States. China, in fact, is never mentioned once in the essay, nor is the concept of defeating the United States. Asked about these characterizations, Pillsbury said that, in China, "There seems to be a taboo from directly saying the United States. And these people use euphemism." If that's the inference, then why doesn't the paper explain this? "Because sometimes when I turn in my first draft, somebody will say, 'Be specific. Say what you mean.'" Pillsbury also takes dramatic liberties with his translations. At one point in China Debates the Future Security Environment, for example, Pillsbury refers to an essay by one General Pan Junfeng that discusses the significance of the IT revolution for future warfare. He cites three sentences, placing them in direct quotation marks: "We can make the enemy's command centers not work by changing their data system. We can cause the enemy's headquarters to make incorrect judgments by sending disinformation. We can dominate the enemy's banking system and even its entire social order." But Pan's piece is worded quite differently. The original sentences--there are actually four, not three--appear in a section discussing the limitations of technological superiority, and they're introduced by a topic sentence discussing how using computers to wage war might allow one side to cause the opposing side (no nationalities are named) "to sink into an information disaster." Two Chinese speakers translating directly from a summer 1996 issue of China Military Science came up with nearly identical translations that read as follows: For example, altering relevant data in the enemy's computer system can cause his command centers and weapons systems to be flooded with mistaken information and thereby unable to function normally. Pouring false intelligence into the enemy's computer network can cause his command office to make mistaken decisions, thereby bringing about faults in strategic policy. Issuing false orders to the enemy's army through the enemy's computer system can cause the enemy army to take orders from oneself and military movements to sink into confusion. Using the computer system to destroy the enemy country's bank accounts can sow confusion in the enemy country's financial and economic order, causing social unrest, and so forth. Looking back at Pillsbury's version of the above passage, then, it's apparent that he's taken Pan's original sentences and added a non- existent "we," thereby ascribing implicit nationalities to the parties where none is named, and has truncated the original sentences beyond normal conventions of translation. Shown the different translations, Pillsbury, responding in an email, said, "I do not ascribe nationalities to the parties. [A]nd I remind you that it is a photo caption. I had no editorial control over the photo captions." But the photo caption is taken directly from a passage in the body of the book. Pillsbury also claimed to have met personally with General Pan and to have been told "how to interpret his article." But Pillsbury did not explain why he chose to write his interpretation directly into passages that appear in quotation marks. The "photo caption" of General Pan, meanwhile, did not go unnoticed by the press. It was quoted, for instance, in a Washington Times article, "Pentagon Study Finds China Preparing for War with U.S.," which used it to show that "China also plans electronic attacks on computer networks." And what about the "Assassin's Mace," one of Pillsbury's major preoccupations? Here, Pillsbury appears to have taken a common Chinese term, shashoujian, and decided, based on his own unfamiliarity with it ("I first saw this unusual term in…1995," he writes in a 2003 article) that it indicates what he calls a "secret project." In fact, though, the term has been around for centuries and has been revived in contemporary Chinese pop culture, a slangy phrase that appears in articles about everything from soccer to romance. Pillsbury cites public speeches by Chinese leaders and articles in Chinese newspapers that speak of developing "shashoujian" weapons, but he never explains how this adds up to evidence of a secret program. It's as if a Chinese researcher, hearing a U.S. official speaking of a need for "kick-ass weapons," were to become confused by the term "kick-ass" and conclude that there must be a secret "kick-ass weapons" program. In short, Pillsbury has identified a secret program that, by all indications, is literally no more than a figure of speech. "Poetic license" Pillsbury's techniques of scholarship carry into his approach to self-promotion. Again, claims and evidence clash. The Wall Street Journal profile, for instance, wrote that "Mr. Pillsbury has never had to worry about steady employment. He's a member of the Pillsbury flour family," and a 1987 Washington Post article describes him as "related to the merchant-millionaire Pillsburys of Minneapolis." In Washington, this is helpful: It brings access to powerful people, attracts invitations to the right parties, and conveys the impression of immunity from the conflicts of interest that might bedevil needier men. Pillsbury's defenders often point to his wealth as an indication of his detachment from career urgencies. A close examination of the Pillsbury flour fortune, however, shows no links to Michael Pillsbury. Asked about his ties to the family, Pillsbury is at first tentative: "It's a matter of degree. I am in the Pillsbury family tree in America." What about the flour fortune? "I don't know where that phrase came from. It didn't come from me." Pillsbury speculates that journalists might indulge in "poetic license." Similarly, desirable professional affiliations attach themselves to him, but they're often obsolete. Pillsbury continues to figure as a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council in articles, websites, and public appearances, even though he hasn't been with the Council since 1996. He claims to correct such errors "constantly" and says that his rivals are trying to undermine him. "There is this bastard down at the Atlantic Council who is a policy opponent of mine," Pillsbury explains. "He is the one that goes around accusing me of claiming to be a senior fellow when I am not. So, I called him directly. Stop doing this. He got really plucky." And who is he? "I seem to have forgotten his name." Part of Pillsbury's authority derives from steady appearances in the media, to which he appears to be drawn. (Back in the 1980s, The Washington Post described Pillsbury as "an acknowledged master of political machination," and Time singled him out as one of "Washington's Master Leakers.") Today, Pillsbury makes frequent on-the-record appearances in a variety of sources, from The Wall Street Journal to Defense News, from The Washington Times to "Lou Dobbs Tonight" on CNN. Still, he says, "I don't return most reporters' phone calls," adding, "I am not, generally speaking, allowed to talk to the press." Lately, a reliable ally has been Washington Times columnist Bill Gertz, with whom, according to an August 2002 article in the Oriental Economist, Pillsbury has regularly teamed up to derail nominations to key Asia-related jobs. This, too, Pillsbury denies: "I have occasionally, about five times, given Gertz on-the-record quotes for his stories." Actually, Pillsbury's name has appeared in 32 stories by Gertz since the late 1990s, of which at least 15 have contained on-the-record quotes. Pillsbury's maneuverings and string-pulling often resemble scenes out of a spy novel, so it's no surprise that he's written his own. Pillsbury says the book still awaits clearance. "There are certain security review authorities," he explains. And he makes an offer: "I think I will put you in it. May have to have you killed off early in chapter one." In Washington, not many experts with such a record of self-sabotage would retain their influence at the top. But there's a market for Pillsbury: There may be no other China expert with such hawkish views and a Ph.D. who has also served extensively in both the executive and legislative branches of government. More important, he gives his sponsors the research they want. China may turn into a serious enemy, or it may not. For now, we have chosen to assume the former, along with the costs. If the Bush administration has taught us anything, however, it's that overestimating a threat can be as dangerous as underestimating one. Rumsfeld and Pillsbury, it appears, take a different view. But what those of us on the outside must decide, once again, is whether the experts the White House hawks are choosing for their particular insight are really experts at all--whether their specialty lies in facts or speculation, in scholarship or in advertising, in conclusions based on evidence or in evidence based on conclusions.

The Diplomat China’s Secret Plan to Supplant the United States A new book claims to shed light on a strategy that would make China the sole superpower by 2049. By Elizabeth C. Economy May 03, 2015

We are entering the season of presidential primary politics, and many of the candidates—or at least their advisors—might benefit from a fresh look at the current crop of foreign policy books. China should be at or near the top of every candidate’s bedside reading list. With that in mind, I have begun to make my way through the mounting pile of new books and reports on U.S.-China relations that has accumulated over the past few months and thought I might offer a few reflections on what is novel and most useful—or not— from each. For those of you who have already read one of books, I welcome your thoughts. First up is Dr. Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon (Henry Holt and Co., 2015). Let me begin by noting that this is a highly engaging and thought-provoking read. It does what few books do well, and that is to mix scholarship, policy, and memoir-style writing in an accessible but still intellectually rich fashion. Pillsbury, senior fellow and director for Chinese strategy at the Hudson Institute, presents a straightforward thesis. In its most bald form, he argues that China has a long-term marathon strategy to supplant the United States as the sole superpower by 2049. If successful, Pillsbury argues that China will reshape the world into one that will “nurture autocracies,” “rewrit[e] history to defam[e] the West and prais[e] China,” sell its own highly polluting development model to other countries, and constrain the political space for international organizations (195). If that were all there were to this book, it would be easy to dismiss. Pillsbury, however, manages to draw on his extensive knowledge of Chinese historical military writings and theory as well as his interactions with Chinese defectors and senior military officers to develop a compelling analytical defense of this thesis. He describes his theory elegantly in Chinese terms, using a Chinese concept of shi (an alignment of forces or creation of an opportunity). For Pillsbury, in shi and the Chinese game weiqi, one can discern the basic Chinese strategy of “deceiving an opponent into complacency, whereby he expends his energy in a way that helps you even as you move to encircle him” (42-45). This theme of Chinese deception and U.S. naivete underpin much of Pillsbury’s analysis. He argues that through an elaborate plan of deception in which China underplays its strengths, Beijing has managed to dupe the West into helping China develop its economy and advance its scientific capabilities, therein planting the seeds of the United States’ own destruction. Throughout the book Pillsbury provides fascinating snippets from his discussions with Chinese, who admit to him the existence of various elements of this strategy. For example, the Chinese government uses media and foreign policy writings very deliberately to shape foreign public opinion—essentially engaging in a long-term and widespread campaign of disinformation. He reviews Chinese history texts only to discover that Beijing has rewritten the history of U.S.-China relations as one in which the United States has been committed to the containment of China since President John Tyler in 1844 and has done nothing to help the development of the PRC (104). He also offers instances in which mistranslations or ignorance of Chinese phrases have led U.S. officials to take a far more benign view of China’s leaders than was merited. If the strength of Pillsbury’s book is in the clarity of his argument and the fresh insights he provides, the weakness rests in the book’s lack of nuance. For example, although he acknowledges that there are moderates within China who do not subscribe to this marathon strategy, their perspectives and how much weight they have in the decision-making process are not explored. By the end of the book, I had the feeling that the author could only see the U.S-China relationship through this dark prism that he had constructed. In a few cases, he also overplays his hand. In discussing the environment, for example, he talks about China’s export of pollution, claiming that China will condemn the world to “smell, taste, and choke,” on Chinese success (186). Implicit in this is a failure to acknowledge that the people who suffer most from this pollution are the Chinese themselves. I don’t really believe that China’s pollution problem is a deliberate or malign effort to make the world suffer. Pillsbury offers recommendations, of course, for how the United States can avoid losing out to China (215- 228). Some are on target: translate more Chinese writings so that we understand what they are really thinking. Some are already happening: building coalitions of like-minded countries in China’s neighborhood. And some will be difficult—if not impossible—to implement in the current environment: fund more rule of law and civil society programs in China. In the end, whether you agree with Pillsbury or not, the book is well worth a careful read. Next up I will take a look at two reports on U.S.-China relations—one by former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd on U.S.-China relations and another by former U.S. government officials and scholars Ashley Tellis and Robert Blackwill. Elizabeth C. Economy is C.V. Starr Senior Fellow and Director for Asia Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is an expert on Chinese domestic and foreign policy and U.S.-China relations and author of the award-winning book, The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future. This post appears courtesy of CFR.org and Forbes Asia. Social Matter

Not Your Grandfather's Conservatism

Wednesday

4 March 2015

14 COMMENTS Reviewing China’s Hundred Year Marathon Written by Michael Laurel Posted in Uncategorized

Michael Pillsbury is a man experienced and knowledgeable in the political sphere. His work has informed Presidents, Generals, and Congressman and determined the strength and scope of their policies. He is one of those men who hide behind the curtain, those whose words send legions of spooks into action. But all indirectly, all hands off, all through analysis. And it’s fitting. He’s got the looks for it. He’s also the mastermind behind the recent foreign policy hit, “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”. In it he scares the bejesus out of American bureaucrats with predictions like “Beijing will push diplomatic demands that seem impracticable or inconceivable today – and other nations will yield to China’s pressure.” And they should be scared, because Pillsbury is right, but wrong and right again. Pillsbury describes what he calls ‘The Hundred Year Marathon’. The Marathon is, according to the Ying Pao aka China’s Hawk faction, a multigenerational plan to attain global superiority economically with cultural, diplomatic, and military dominance not far behind. China will be the glorious beneficiary of this plan while the United States of America will continue to sink into the background of nations having lost its superpower status. China intends to accomplish this fearsome feat by employing the nine elements of the Marathon, listed below: 1. Induce complacency to avoid alerting your opponent. 2. Manipulate your opponent’s advisers. 3. Be patient – for decades, or longer – to achieve victory. 4. Steal your opponent’s ideas and technology for strategic purposes. 5. Military might is not the critical factor for winning a long-term competition. 6. Recognize that the hegemon will take extreme, even reckless action to retain its dominant position. 7. Never lose sight of shi. 8. Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers. 9. Always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others. Gutsy news and gusty predictions I see. Not only does Pillsbury claim that China, the ever faithful friend and economic ally of America, intends to supplant the USA, he claims that China is using explicitly hostile measures to accomplish it! But is there any proof to those claims, or proof even of motive and desire for such a place? Pillsbury doesn’t wait for covert Sinophiles to derail the discussion and immediately proclaims proof for all these provocative claims. Let’s begin with motive. For starters Pillsbury claims that the primary desire of the people of China is not the proclamation of freedom, democracy, and human rights, nor the general triumph of liberalism in the world. He claims what the Chinese people crave most, peasant and elite alike, is the uplifting of China as a power in its own right, as the great sovereign of East Asia that it has been so many times before. But this time the Chinese want to expand their hegemony world wide! They want a Chinese world, with a dominant Chinese culture and a dominant Chinese language. They want the 21st century to be theirs. To call this motive ambitious would be an understatement, but to call it sinister would not. But is it true? Yes and no. Like Pillsbury I enjoy the study of history. Like Pillsbury I think that the past shows us the solutions to problems of the present. And like Pillsbury I know the history of the Chinese. And I don’t necessarily agree with him. I think his extremely aggressive pro-American perspective blinds him to the subtleties of the Chinese position. First consider history. China has at least 2500 years of well-recorded history, perhaps much more if current archaeological digs are successful. This has given China a penchant for patience and the long view. Now China has historically been the hegemon of its world. It has lorded over east Asia in ever sense and has enjoyed respect worthy of its hegemonic status. Neighbors didn’t alternate between bouts of power and lack thereof, they alternated between paying tribute and not paying tribute, depending on the strength of their nation and the weakness of the dynasty in power. China has always dominated the picture. But during this hegemony China has always been extremely measured in its attitudes. Take the Koreans. China has dominated the various Korean kingdoms for hundreds of years, and China has certainly had a powerful cultural influence on the small peninsular country. Sometimes this influence was bullish, at other times it was soft, but it was always there. However, did they try to absorb them into the nation outright? Despite countless opportunities China has not. Some might say that I misjudge China here, for China is vast and did not get that way by Han colonization alone. China stretches from Urumqi to Lhasa to Guangzhou to Manchuria. How would they attain these lands if not by force? For that again, we must turn our eyes to Chinese history for it will further enlighten us as to the question of Chinese ambitions. Under the Han people China very rarely goes conquering abroad. The Chinese priority has always been unification of the North China plain, the integration of geopolitically necessary locations, and the maintenance of stability. That is all. The bulk of China’s many conquests have been undertaken when China was under the control of a stronger foreign invader. For example, the Mongols expanded China under the Yuan dynasty far beyond the traditional Han or Jin dynasty borders, and the Manchus were responsible almost entirely for the modern China borders. This is not to say that China isn’t aggressive, that it isn’t ambitious, or that it doesn’t want the 21st century to be a Chinese one. It absolutely does. What it means is that the Chinese don’t look at hegemony the same the West does. Pillsbury focuses on the Spring and Autumn Annals as a source for Ying Pai inspiration and he’s right to do so. But I don’t think it’s lost on the Ying Pai hawks that the modern day isn’t the era of Warring States. The nature of the game has changed. The Warring States period provides timeless truths as to human nature and political governance to be certain, but it fails to deliver an appropriate mentality for modern dominance. The Chinese have clued into that. The Chinese see that the only way forward for them is through cooperation. Cooperation given freely, cooperation given fully, cooperation undertaken now. That’s why the Chinese reach out to every nation on the planet and attempt to win them over with money and quaint Chinese culture. It’s not because they want to convert the world in their image. Unlike the Americans, the Chinese know that the whole world does not care to be Chinese. They want to spread out and cooperate because they know that’s the only way for them to survive. They must start offering win-win solutions everywhere. This recalibrated idea of hegemony is Kryptonite to Pillsbury hypothesis, but only because he overextends himself in thinking that China wants to be the new America. China wants to be the new China, the restored China, but not the new America. Once we correct this by, at the very least, assuming we don’t fully know Chinese intentions we find the work is a veritable treasure trove of Chinese strategic thought. Consider the first of nine elements in China’s Marathon plan: Induce complacency to avoid alerting the opponent. This is a classic Chinese maxim and is employed near universally, especially in business. The Chinese always seek to manipulate the thoughts and perceptions of their opponents, always. They only risk betting on outright confrontation when they’re sure they can win. This has filled the Chinese people with a kind of guile that extends to every field of their activity. In business they are always attentive not to marketing their own business but of manipulating the perceptions of their competitors. In science their institutions are notoriously opaque. And on the national-strategic scale they are extremely careful to hide their actions, always wishing to be thought of as non-threatening, non-hostile, strictly neutral. The entire Chinese foreign policy of non-intervention is oriented around this maxim. Again, this is to be expected. The origin of the maxim reaches back into the depths of not only the Warring States period but into every other major period of turmoil and civil war that the Chinese remember. The Qin were always careful to mold alliances to the benefit of other parties while hiding their own goal of total hegemonic dominance. Liu Bei, future Emperor of the Kingdom of Shu Han, was always careful to tip toe around the mighty Prime Minister of the Han Empire, Cao Cao. His greatest fear was that his own ambition be found out and exposed, for he knew that would spell enormous risk at the least and rapid death at the worst. So Liu Bei bided his time, waiting patiently, ultimately overcoming the mighty Cao Cao at the epic Battle of Red Cliff. Shortly afterwards, employing the same principles, he stunned his former ally Wu and seized Jing province in a stunning act of boldness and strategic forethought. Such stories litter Chinese history. It should be no surprise that their foreign policy is full of such attitudes. The second element of the Marathon plan reflects the spirit of the first. The Chinese have maintained large empires and bureaucracies for thousands of years and know full well that the most powerful players are often the advisers. The advisers advise, they hold influence, and they assist in the practical implementation of almost any plan. China has seen advisers run amok many times, as with the Eunuchs and the tyrant Dong Zhuo, or the usurpers to the Kingdom of Wei in the Sima clan. So they have made enormous investments into encouraging American foreign policy thought in specific directions. The result was 20 years of China naivete where countless professional analysts wrote China off as a simple Panda instead of a cunning Dragon. China continues to manipulate public perceptions across the world by utilizing adviser corrupting institutions such as the Confucius Institute. They come to teach Chinese bringing bags of money with them. And they do not hesitate to use these funds when they deem it in the Chinese interest to silence critics. This leads us to the third element, the most critical one of them all if China is to overcome American hegemony: The necessity of patience. In the 1970s China was still recovering from successive catastrophes: Famine, military conflict with the Soviet Union, multiple embargoes, the catharsis of its own academic class. And yet China dreamed. It’s conflict with the Soviet Union, which China initiated, was an expression of its ambition. China had always intended to be a key player in world politics. It longed for its former status as the hegemon of East Asia. It could not tolerate its subordinate position to Moscow. So for 25 years it waited patiently in preparation for a turn away from Moscow and towards wherever else it could go, ultimately leading to the American-Chinese alliance under Nixon. The Hundred Year Marathon is simply another expression of this patience as China intends to climb all the way back to the top to what they feel is their natural place in the hierarchy of nations. Again, this patience should not surprise anyone. Given Chinese culture and history all these qualities seem obvious in hindsight. China has always taken the long view of anything. Their behavior toward the valuation of the Yuan shows extensive foresight, their infrastructure projects, though often failing, show them reaching out into the future. This is the nature of China. Again we could look back to their history for further examples. Consider how the Chinese overcame the Xiongnu, as I described in previous discussions on the Chinese idea of hegemony, Tianxia. China, after being subordinated by the Xiongnu, spent a hundred years slowly reversing the situation until finally the Xiongnu ended up a vassal of the Chinese Emperor. What they Chinese lost in blood they regained by patience. China’s rise in the 20th and 21st century has been considered rapid, but there is still much farther to go. China doesn’t want to merely grow. It wants to grow the best, to be the most advanced, to enjoy the pinnacle of success as has been historically proper to it. For this reason China employs the fourth element of the strategy, to steal the opponents ideas and technologies and utilize them for strategic success. China under Mao spent 25 years, longer if you count their years resisting the Kuomintang, under the thumb of the Soviet Union. Why? To gain their support for certain, but moreso to gain their technology, their culture, their understanding. The Soviet Union singlehandedly built Communist China in the years after the Nationalist expulsion to Taiwan. Eventually the Soviets caught wind of Chinese intentions and this lead to the dramatic escalations in Xinjiang and Manchuria between the two opposing red armies. After siphoning as much technology and cultural know- how from the Soviets as they could they began to look for a new benefactor, first to secure their position and security and second to learn from in return. I don’t need to tell anyone how that turned out. Commercially and financially China is a phenomenally powerful country, second only to the USA and to the city of London on the financial front. They have learned the American lessons expertly, relying on the World Bank and the IMF to give them useful financial advice. The modern Chinese strategy of manipulating the Yuan and using state-owned enterprises in virtually every sensitive market area? A Western strategy, coming directly from the Western financial elite. They handed it to them on a platter with a note: If you want to beat America economically, follow this formula. Central to this formula was the importation of manufacturing from America especially into China under favorable terms. Why? Because it was the most effective way to gain access to decades of costly research for minimal cost. Notice that countless Chinese manufacturing areas aren’t turning a profit. The state uses subsidies and runs its state owned enterprises (SOEs) at a financial loss. They do this to crush foreign manufacturing competition and to bring home massive amounts of foreign-developed technology. And the program has been a fascinating success. Consider that Iphones, some of the most advanced commercial electronics in the world, are constructed in China and not America. Its not because of labor. Its because China will do whatever it takes to bring these advanced technology companies to the country where they can pilfer the technology at will. Remember also that China has virtually no intellectual property or patent law enforcement. The market is a free for all! And that’s how the Chinese like it at this stage, the growing stage. All the while China engages in extensive industrial and economic espionage as well. There is a not- so-secret cyber war going on between Chinese and American hackers as the Chinese try to probe American systems and, where able, extract sensitive information. For example the Joint Strike Fighter program, aka the F-35 Lightning, has had its data pilfered multiple times. And that’s America’s most expensive military R&D program to date. Notice that nowhere have I mentioned the prioritization of military force. While the nuclear age makes conventional superiority somewhat redundant the Chinese disincentive that kind of violence even more. They know that they could not engage the military of America and be victorious and worse, the declaration of open hostility between the Americans and the Chinese would constitute the immediate encirclement of China and a blockade by sea, the great Chinese strategic nightmare. Peace is a requirement for them. This does not mean military preparations are not important to the Chinese, for they are. Only that they are not the priority or the critical factor in the outcome of this drawn-out battle. On the military front the Chinese have been keen to develop a number of mobile weapon systems to counter America superiority. The Chinese military perspective is, in one sense, similar to the Russian one: Build maximally low cost counter-weapons to high cost enemy armament. An expression of this could be seen in the Serbian Army’s counter to the American bombing campaign: They would build tank, artillery, and anti-aircraft shells out of wood, then stick tractor and truck engines in them. The total cost would be a few hundred dollars. The Americans would come in with their fancy fighters and their fancy weapons and drop $300,000 guided bombs on the targets. The result was a small mobile force financially bleeding the worlds most powerful airforce, and this contributed to the American move to target almost strictly civilian, commercial, and industrial infrastructure. The Chinese are engaged in the same game, except their targets are much larger. The Chinese have designed what they call ‘Assassin’s Mace’ weapons. And Assassin’s Mace is an extremely low cost weapon that acts as a force multiplier against something more powerful and expensive. For example the Chinese designed a great American naval fear, the anti-carrier missile. Each missile costs a few million dollars but should a single one strike an American aircraft carrier the Americans will lose a ship worth billions upon billions and which is not readily replaceable. Another such tool is the anti-satellite missile, which the Chinese notoriously tested last decade against their own satellite. Both of these weapons are low cost relative to the targets they destroy and both are mobile and can be utilized by roadside launchers. This makes them almost impossible to find. Clearly they are no strangers to military innovation. While the Chinese have developed these fearsome, specifically anti-American military technologies they are under no illusions that using them is a good idea. Chinese history teaches time and time and again that a hegemon will go to drastic, desperate lengths to preserve its position at the top of the hierarchy. And in a nuclear age no one can afford desperate action, especially desperation in the USA. This desperation is becoming increasingly obvious today as the USA makes riskier interventions every year on increasingly flimsy justifications while suffering increasing amounts of societal destabilization. Asabiyyah has been eroded internally and intentionally, so the American state responds with kicking its hegemonic role into overdrive. How else would the USA find itself in both Georgia and the Ukraine, both clear Russian areas of interest? How else would it find itself virtually funding the Umbrella Revolution in Hong Kong when such a measure will obviously put the Chinese on edge and invoke a response? The Americans are clearly desperate to maintain their power, so all competitors must dance nimbly around them or risky catastrophic nuclear annihilation. And not just of themselves; of the whole world. So we have come to the place the Chinese fear most. Finally we reach the final three elements: Awareness of Shi, the use of metrics maximally, and the avoiding of encirclement and deception. All relate to one another in a curious way. First is the concept of Shi which is critical yet unspoken of in the West. Shi is the political current so to speak, the current trend, the rising and falling of forces. I suspect it has a lot to do with the structure of the Chinese language, the idea of Qi or energy and the constant flow of information this way. The concept is excellent and has incredible amounts of utility. However Shi can be modified; All actions by all players affect it to varying degree. It is like each actor is walking in a very shallow, very sensitive creek. The movement of various actors will affect the flow of the water as it continues downstream. This is why metrics are so important. Every possible metric needs to be recorded, quantified and review. Maximal knowledge will reveal the maximal number of opportunities to influence Shi in the favor of one’s own party. The Americans, for example, are experts at manipulating Shi via their propaganda and information warfare. They can create rebellion from almost nothing and rapidly turn small scale protests into full on riots. Always though Shi remains a somewhat impersonal force, open to influence but never control. The American failing is their constant seeking of control, which is doomed to failure. This brings us to the final element, the need to avoid encirclement and deception. This is the traditional America weakness. The Americans all too often see what they want to see. Their foreign policy is best described as ‘You create your own reality’. Take the Ukraine. The Americans figure if they say enough times that Russia is fighting it will be the truth, or at least everyone will believe it. This approach leads to them getting deceived repeatedly as we saw in Debaltsevo, as we saw with Putin’s rise, as we see with continued Syrian survival, and as we see with countless other small events that fail to go the way of the Americans. In contrast the Chinese fear this most of all, for wishful thinking leads to being deceived, and to be deceived leads to encirclement, and encirclement leads to catastrophic loss. This contributes to their love and devotion to metrics. Everything needs to be measured as accurately as possible; for if we do not measure it how do we know we aren’t being deceived? Only by avoiding deception and encirclement and outlasting the Hegemon as it makes increasingly foolish moves can the Marathon be completed successfully. Having touched and explained each of the elements I want to move towards the American response. Pillsbury insists that America is unaware of all these Chinese ploys, of the games they play, and the Chinese suspicion of America’s counter encircling strategies constitutes projection. I think the exact opposite. In fact I suspect that Pillsbury is using the same deceptive counter-tactics to implore his audience to action and strengthen his rhetoric. After all if America really is altruistic in its policies towards China then China has utterly betrayed it, and actions according to Pillsbury’s prescription are necessary right away! But of course this is silly. America is the hegemon of the world. It did not become hegemon by being altruistic, and Pillsbury must know he is presenting an intentionally false picture of the American worldview. He does this several times throughout the book, applying a kind of generosity to the American state that it simply doesn’t have. The Americans cultivate the illusion of generosity, of virtue, of freedom and kindness and all the good things in life. But in practice their state practices the opposite, leaving only chaos and destruction and suffering and pain in its wake. But always it does this in a specific fashion, in an orderly fashion, with intention and care. Consider the Chinese fear of encirclement. Pillsbury laments that no measures are being undertaken to halt it, but this is a barefaced lie on his part. The Americans are presently attempting the ultimate encirclement gesture via the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement that specifically excludes China while uniting East and South-East Asia with North America in a vast common market that explicitly favors American economic domination. In the modern world strict military alliances are not needed. Economic extra- constitutional agreements like this signify alliance in all but name. Were this agreement ratified it would lock East Asia into the American sphere and cripple China which needs their growing economics to grow its own. A similar move is being played to encircle Russia with the Trans-Atlantic partnership. And of course America is masterful in its use of Shi, constantly creating or manipulating circumstances to suit larger geopolitical needs. Nobody does it better than the Americans. We must also consider the Ying Pais themselves, the faction that most heavily follows and supports the elements of the marathon. Their strength derives direct from the over imperialism of the Hegemon, of America. When America is quiet Ying Pai strength diminishes. When America is loud and aggressive, as it is now, Ying Pai influence explodes and China changes course accordingly. A pacifistic American regime could easily instigate major reform in China by simply backing off, making the Ying Pai and their hawkish rhetoric seem foolish. But obviously America will never do that, although Pillsbury portrays exactly those qualities in America. Clearly Pillsbury’s notion of the innocent America reeks to high heaven of the same Chinese deceit and manipulation that he deplores in his book. Of course it is natural to use it, it is the way for those who receive that excellent education into the nature of political method and life. And that’s what the this book is: A glimpse into the Chinese political paradigm, and a largely accurate one at that. That Pillsbury uses the very techniques he laments is testimony to that. I will say this: China definitely has a Hundred Year Marathon, but the outcome of the Marathon will be decided within the next 5 years. It is our collective curse and blessing to live in such exciting times! http://www.socialmatter.net/2015/03/04/reviewing-chinas-hundred-year- marathon/#sthash.8dRrBU8Y.dpuf