By Elizabeth C. Economy
A new book claims to shed light on a strategy that would make China the sole superpower by 2049.
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.
Read the full story at The Diplomat