In the foreign policy establishment anyway, this book appears to be one of them: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (2015). The author, Michael Pillsbury, is a longtime American foreign policy strategist, goes way back to the Nixon era and still has the ears of the current regime and its agents in foreign policy. Trump named Pillsbury chair of the Defense Policy Board in 2020. The Stanford and Columbia graduate has spent years in China, speaks Mandarin, and for over the last half century has worked in that strange intersection between foreign policy research and national security intelligence operations. He’s not Indiana Jones but he might like thinking of himself as something like that. He has worked for the Department of Defense, the Pentagon, think tank outfits like the RAND Corporation, served as a close advisor to Reagan, and then worked as a Senate staffer for years before ending up at the Heritage Foundation, where, yes, he contributed to the anti-government monstrously inhumanitarian Project 2025. (2) Pillsbury appears to be the indisputable senior chair of the “China-hawks” in the US government at the present time, or close enough for my purposes anyway.
The argument in the 100-Year Marathon can be summarized in a few notes about the full title of the book. The century referred to begins with the Chinese communist revolution in 1949, establishing the People’s Republic of China and the rule of the Communist Party of China (CPC), and is supposed to end in 2049, by which time the CPC and China will have overtaken the US as the global superpower. Or in the nomenclature of foreign policy strategists like Pillsbury, China will have become the “hegemon,” a dominant leader exercising overwhelming authority over others in a group; or as discussed in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (TAoW), the ancient Chinese text Pillsbury’s analysis leans on, ‘Ba,’ or lord or overlord. To Pillsbury, China, or the CPC, an aggressive nationalist cult, is plotting to overthrow the US as the world’s supreme superpower and their ambitions are revealed in the teachings of China’s ancient text TAoW.
The “secret” part in the subtitle appears to be rooted in the galling personal experience of Pillsbury representing the US in diplomatic negotiations with China for over the last half a century. Pillsbury’s origin story in US-China foreign policy is almost too strange but true and on the nose. He is literally the guy who wrote the policy paper that began US military ties with communist China in the 1970s. The first such ties with China since the 1945-1949 civil war (when the US sided against the CPC and against communist China, we should hasten to note and underline). The culmination of this new post-Nixon in China link was the production of weapons in China that supported US counterinsurgency against Russia in Afghanistan in the ‘80s (and helped launch the terrorist group behind the attacks of September 11, 2001, al-Queda, let's also note). At the time, ‘70s and ‘80s, after decades of global cold war violence and proxy armed struggles, splitting Sino-Soviet relations felt like a foreign policy (and counterintelligence) coup and the thing to do. Pillsbury is essentially the author of the “China card” in Cold War era global geopolitics.
But since those heady optimistic times in US-China covert military relations, Pillsbury has come to regard China’s “Reform and Opening Up” campaign that began with Nixon in China in 1972 as a big ruse. A cover up of covert strategies China was pursuing against the US from the gitgo. China’s real strategy all along, according to Pillsbury, has been deeply and aggressively imperialist. And we can tell this because it is rooted in a Hawkish nationalist reading of China’s ancient Warring States period and the foreign policy strategies espoused in TAoW, a book widely recognized today as a classic text in foreign policy and military history.
A big chunk of Pillsbury’s 100-Year Marathon book is revisionist history of US-China relations since Nixon went to China in 1972. For starters, Pillsbury asserts that Nixon’s historic visit to China wasn’t on Nixon’s initiative but the launch of a Chinese scheme to lure the US into giving China all its modernizing technologies. Other historical accounts refute this take on the timing alone by noting that in known records and documents of that time Nixon was talking openly about wanting to improve relations and increase trade with mainland China several years before Mao or anybody in the CPC was saying anything about meeting up with the US. But Pillsbury, whose primary interlocutors in China were Hawkish members of the CPC’s foreign policy and military establishment, knows better. (3)
Likewise, Deng Xioping’s visit to the US in 1978 wasn’t really about any “Reform and Opening Up” in China at all, as was propagandized in conventional accounts. Instead, in keeping with the teachings in TAoW, applying the idea of ‘Shi,’ which translates roughly as “potential born of disposition” or “strategic advantage.” Basically, "Shi" means applying vigilant analysis and awareness of the ever-changing configuration of power between combatants (or warring states) to achieve national security and/or strategic preeminence. Rather than benevolent exchanges in trade and education, in '78 Deng and China were lulling the US into sympathy for China’s benign weaknesses so as to extract from the US its strengths: Most crucially, technological and military strengths.
According to Pillsbury, China is using the ancient Chinese strategies of TAoW, written over 2000 years ago in China’s foundational period known as the Warring States, to subdue and dominate the US. In TAoW, in any contest, you make assessments and judgments about the strengths and weaknesses of your opponents before going to war with them. In preparation for battle you attempt to acquire your enemies’ strengths and figure out how to exploit their weaknesses. In Deng’s “Reform and Opening Up” campaign, Pillsbury argues, China was trying to acquire the US’s technological and military strengths by convincing the US that China was no threat but merely wanted the US to help modernize China with education and technology in exchange for more US trade with China, which was in fact more or less Deng’s headline case when he visited the US in 1978.
To Pillsbury, the Tiananmen Square protests and crackdown in 1989, a decade later, resulting in the deaths of “hundreds if not thousands” of Chinese protesters (says Amnesty International), was the decisive baring of China’s savage TAoW teeth, asserting the CPC's military supremacy, in China's 100-Year Marathon strategy for world domination. For Pillsbury all pretenses and chances for real reform and/or an opening up in China are snuffed out in that violent crackdown. Subsequent history in China is marked exclusively by the strict suppression of dissent, more crackdowns on any criticism of the CPC, and aggressive military opposition to anything perceived as an independence movement within and increasingly even outside its borders (Tibet, Uyghurs in Xinjiang, Hong Kong, Taiwan), including extensive spycraft and espionage operations against the US.
All true as far as it goes or from what I know anyway, and acknowledging upfront that I'm certain there's all kinds of spycraft and cyber warfare stuff going on all the time between the US and China and other states that I have no idea about. But an easy case can be made that the conservative hostility in China to any perceived threats to the CPC’s supreme authority, and especially disregard for basic human rights in China, hardly started or ended with Tiananmen. The death toll from the Cultural Revolution sweeping China still at the time of Nixon in China, 1972, was many times greater than any death toll attributable to Tiananmen Square or any other related Chinese state violence in 1989. Many historians attribute the paranoid extremes of the violent crackdown at Tiananmen to CPC fear and elite panic about ruling communist parties in Eastern Europe, with whom the CPC maintained close diplomatic ties, facing mass street protests and rebellions in '89. Protesting students in Tiananmen were there for a host of reasons (for one, getting rid of members of the Hawkish old guard many still associated with the violence and intolerance of the cultural revolution) but the CPC leadership under Deng became convinced that over a half million protesters in Tiananmen were a grave threat to CPC rule, like the street revolutions breaking up the Soviet Union that very same year.
Seeing their communist comrade states go down to popular democratic street rebellions was scary and alarming to the CPC. Tiananmen was a police state crackdown, paranoid and brutal in its disregard for human rights, to be sure, but hardly any kind of decisive political verdict on China’s 1980-2020 “Reform and Opening Up” period.
Consider just China’s foreign trade alone. Combined imports and exports with China have grown from about $38 billion in 1980 to over $4.6 trillion in 2020. Can there be any more dramatic evidence of China’s “Opening Up” in trade with other countries than that? China’s government, the CPC, are terrible human rights abusers and hostile to democratic human rights and freedoms, but the RaOU campaign in China that Pillsbury is now trying to expose as a sinister plot, let’s note, was clearly killing and ruining fewer lives, by several magnitudes, than China was before the “Reform and Opening Up” policies began. Isn't this significant evidence of reform in China?
Let’s also note that Tiananmen, 1990-ish, also happens to be when China’s economic growth rates really begin to take off; regularly exceeding annual growth rates of over 10%. In the work of economists Isabella Weber and Yuen Yuen Ang, whose books I discussed in my round-up, we learn that the CPC asserting its sovereign power over the economy in China in the 1980s helped China avoid neoliberal shock therapy and the poverty traps of global private capital, the IMF/WB, SAP loans, all that. The evidence in these two accounts illustrate that the assertion of CPC political sovereignty over the private economy, especially this intersection of domestic Chinese businesses with foreign private capital (SEZs, SOEs, restrictions on the flows of foreign private capital in and out of the country), fundamentally and significantly contributed to China’s economic miracle between 1978 and 2020. So, again, China’s resistance to the economic reforms of global private capital and the conventional rules of the WTO, privatization and hostility to government regulations on business, may be associated with murderous state violence of Tiananmen but China’s RaOU policies are also directly related to how China breaks with the pattern of dependency theory in international economic development and becomes the burgeoning global economic juggernaut that it has now become. Global free marketeers are embittered by this turn of events but that doesn’t make it any less so.
It’s why we’re talking about China’s “political capitalism,” China’s state directed capitalism, or industrial policy, a dirty phrase in mainstream economics circles in the US only a short time ago, if not still. We’re talking about this stuff because of the immensity of China’s economic growth miracle since 1978 and how the “Reform and Opening Up” campaign launched that miracle. Launched an industrial revolution in China (in the 2nd or 3rd century of industrial revolutions) at a scale, more than 1.4 billion people in China, the world has not experienced before. It’s by no means entirely clear yet the full impact of the China shock but the economic implications appear stunning and potentially revolutionary.
For starters, China has taken over the global green energy tech market, cranking out consumer friendly solar panels and batteries and super cheap EVs-- a company known as BYD already turning out the VW Bug’s of EVs-- and producing this stuff at prices and scales with which the big private multinationals can’t compete. Meanwhile, Big Tech in the US is peddling AI and crypto and a techno utopia of automated AI Singularity. Broligarchs promising to liberate us all from labor and toil when they already can’t pay their workers living wages or get along with labor unions and refuse to pay their fair share in taxes and essential government services. (To private multinationals all taxes or regulations are govt “waste, fraud, and abuse”; and every problem in govt a spending problem.) So China solves the green energy technologies' problem, or at least launches the global green energy transition. Building the green tech innovations the world needs, technology responding to climate change and real world human demands for decarbonizing global emissions. Building green energy solutions that let’s remember were dismissed as too expensive to produce profitably in the rest of the private global economy as recently as 2010, and still now is being directly attacked by the petrostate regime running the US.
From Tiananmen onward, for Pillsbury, China’s goals are exclusively imperialistic and aggressive: stealing US intellectual property rights, taking over islands in the South China Sea, launching the “Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).” Again, as far as it goes this stuff is all undeniable. But already dating Pillsbury’s account, he goes on to specifically pillory China’s opposition to environmental reforms and international climate treaties like the Kyoto Protocol in ’97 and Paris Agreement in 2015. We know now, however, China has since shot far ahead in manufacturing and high-tech production for a global green energy transition, or certainly at least in the production and global distribution of solar panels, batteries, and EVs. Meanwhile, the regime Pillsbury apparently councils is trying to bring back coal.
Maybe the weirdest part of this book is that I’m pretty sure the nefarious foreign policy cold war strategizing and spy craft stuff, basically, known as counterintelligence, that Pillsbury accuses and condemns China for is in reality more or less the standard operating procedures of every national security state on the planet, or for all the ones rich enough to afford to play in the global superpower game anyway. I would assume DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) and like national security organizations in and US and elsewhere are constantly gaming out perceived threats from China and Russia or whoever. If nothing else, didn’t Wikileaks show us that secret intelligence work goes on extensively between even traditional allies, let alone bitter rivals? This is deterrence theory in practice: States assessing the military strength of enemies and deterring foreign aggression; using military and non-military means to deter enemies from attacking you. Global militaries and national security intelligence operations are constantly gaming out this stuff and have been engaging in aggressive counterintelligence and Hawkish operations like this since at least WW2. (4)
At any rate, Pillsbury appears to have been really triggered by this book that came out in China in 1999 called Unrestricted Warfare. I would prefer very “restricted” warfare myself, for sure, so not a promising title, I admit. In this book, written by a couple Chinese military colonels, the authors reportedly argue China’s “inferior military” can defeat the US’s “superior military” by non-military covert means, financial manipulation, cyber warfare, terrorism, media manipulation, and international legal maneuvers (maybe like BRICS?). Again, all bad stuff, certainly not the conduct of friendly trade relations, and I'm hoping the US is doing some counterintelligence work to deter and/or expose and prosecute these nonmilitary attacks on the US or any of the US's allies. According to Pillsbury, the UW book is very influential in the CPC and most damningly exposes China’s “Reform and Opening Up” campaign as a cover for their far more sinister designs against the US.
For all the Hawkish saber-rattling, though—the US should be more aggressively countering these nefarious non-military covert attacks from China!— the list of remedies at the end of the book is relatively anodyne or irrelevant. Pillsbury thinks we should stop assuming China will become more like the West, or we should stop believing that more trade with China will produce more democracy and human rights in China. Okay, that hope in US-China relations did not pan out, for sure. And, yeah, the US and multinationals working in China ought to protest and reform human rights abuses against minorities and prison labor conditions in China, while also more actively supporting workers and minorities better at home. But I still think that old canard about more peaceful trade nurturing mutually prosperous relations between nations and states is basically right.
Pillsbury argues for more strategic thinking in our economic and technological relations with China. Not unlike the case Chris Miller presents in his 2022 book Chip War. No doubt about it the US shouldn’t be dependent on Taiwan to produce computer chips essential to the US’s national security, up to 80% of such chips, says Miller, when China insists, regularly, and with increasing belligerence, that Taiwan is its sovereign territorial possession. Pillsbury was right to raise the alarm about compromising national security positions with China. And it is concerning how long it took before the Pentagon and US foreign policy establishment and a US POTUS figured this one out (old man Biden strikes again!). It seems like someone in national security should have been calling this out some time ago. But the high-tech guys, and especially Apple, were making too much money in China and off China’s cheap factory labor conditions to worry about giving away tech secrets and national security know-how to China.
Anyway, in retrospect Pillsbury deserves some credit for raising the issue. But Pillsbury’s biggest recommendation, ultimately, is that we should stop thinking of China as a future ally and trade partner altogether and instead treat China as a “long-term strategic competitor.”
Again, okay, but why does it have to be one or the other? Why not US-China “trade partners” and “long-term strategic competitors,” with some long-term hopes that expanding peaceful trade alliances wins out over WW3!? Seems to me a fundamental weakness of the China hawk position is its exclusive insistence on an either/or and Us/Them conflict. For the China hawk, US-China relations are entirely zero-sum and always have to end in decisive conflict. They must. It can’t be any other way. Encouragingly, recent US-China talks, Xi Jinping and Trump, have actually moved the official diplomatic language away from only “strategic competitors” back to something like “stable” trading partners. Maybe Pillsbury contributed to this moderation in US-China diplomatic relations but he'd still insist that the ultimate goal China's 100-Year Marathon remains winning world supremacy over the US.
The weirdest part of Pillsbury’s historical analysis of the TAoW is how he seems to ignore completely the book's central thesis: ‘Shi’ as a kind of deterrence theory aiming to win without fighting, or at the very least vigilantly minimizing violent combat.
Pillsbury encourages readers to consider the deep history of Chinese nationalist thinking but his own reading of that history, the Warring States period, and TAoW, strikes me as a little narrow and one-dimensional. TAoW is in fact a widely read book and praised by numerous US military officials and appears to be almost universally recognized as a classic text by military leaders and national security professionals around the world, far beyond China. WW2 era General MacArthur, reportedly, always kept a copy of TAoW on his desk.
TAoW is ancient classical era expression of deterrence theory or the civilizing mission of resolving social conflicts without violence. TAoW’s prime directive is developing military and foreign policy strategies aimed at preventing or reducing actual war and combat. It reminds me of Aristotle’s quip, "It is not enough to win a war; it is more important to organize the peace." It’s a recognition, an ancient Realpolitiks, that winning at all costs can make peace impossible; that the aim of peaceful authority is resolving social conflicts without war and violence. I hear in TAoW echoes of Machiavelli’s discussions of republican, military deterrence and balancing forces in power; and whose ideas in return overlap with famous Warring State's era Legalist philosopher and statesman, Han Fei. TAoW’s emphasis is on winning without fighting because war is bad for everybody. Sounds civilized to me.
By contrast, in Clausewitz’s On War, a revered Western book on war (again, bless you Wikipedia), and closer to the focus on achieving military supremacy that we find in Pillsbury, the primary directive is to dominate militarily your enemy. To win decisively: including in our own time devastating bombing campaigns, occupations, regime changes, and a long list of military domination strategies that always seem to end, or at least since WW2, in indecisive quagmires with “No End in Sight,” or am I wrong to conclude so much? And even Clausewitz forcefully stipulates that military combat strategies should always remain subordinate to political authorities, who we can hope might engage in some of the non-military strategies of deterrence emphasized in TAoW.
In Unrestricted Warfare, the Chinese Hawk book that so alarmed Pillsbury, the case is made that by using non-military counterintelligence spycraft and espionage and financial fraud, China’s inferior military weapons buildup can defeat the US. Okay, if China is plotting to defeat the US wouldn’t the US prefer that China is plotting to overthrow the US by nonmilitary means rather than by more doomsday arm's race scenarios?! Again, all modern states spend lots of money on national security counterintelligence. Pillsbury’s “China card” is a legendary win in the world of cold war counterintelligence. (4) The best-case scenario for us mere civilians are laws, national and international, that limit the human rights abuses of global counterintelligence operations, the killing and ruining of noncombatant civilian lives. States will always be attempting to secretly assess and deter the threats of other competing states, laws and enforcement against their worst human atrocities is all we got.
At any rate, I’m also not sure TAoW or the historical context of the Warring States period in China, 475 to 221 bce, really makes a very good argument for achieving overwhelming military hegemony or ‘Ba’anyway. I thought China’s RaOU economists finding evidence in ancient “Discourses on Salt and Iron,” from the early Han Dynasty (81 bce), establishing the essential role of the state in stabilizing prices in the economy was brilliant economic history. But this case for a great ‘Ba’ or military ruler unifying China’s Warring States is mostly legend and not very convincing.
There were seven warring states in the traditional heartland of China in the Warring States period; basically, the last long war-ravaged period of the Zhou dynasty that had ruled China since 1046 bce. There were in fact two more long Chinese ruling dynasties, Shang and Xia, stretching back to 2070 bce or a millennium and a half before the Warring States. The TAoW and Warring States are more a cultural hinge in Chinese history than an actual military or economic or even political turning point.
The state that prevailed at the end of the long Warring States period, the Qin, from which China takes its name, was so brutal that its rule lasted only 15 years. Qin Shi Huang, China’s so-called first Emperor (unlike the nearly two millennia of mere ‘kings’ that preceded him), is said to have burned books and buried alive hundreds of scholars he considered opposition to his supreme authority. Qin Shi wanted to live forever and was incredibly paranoid (so paranoid he had constructed a life-size army of 8,000 soldiers to guard over him through eternity) and he likely killed himself taking “immortality elixirs” laced with mercury. This is China’s foundational model for a great “Ba” or supreme leader? To say the least, Qin She Huang was shall we say not very into TAoW’s civilizing means of winning without fighting. No doubt Qin Shi does take some important first steps in solidifying China’s cultural identity, however. First, he tears down walls and fortifications dividing the warring states and starts building walls and fortifications along the northern border frontier of China. The walls never do entirely keep out the horseback riding nomads and raiders to the north of China, the biggest foreign menace to China until the 19th century—for nearly 4000 years!-- but the Great Wall does start drawing the cultural boundaries of China on the map. And Qin She Huang also standardizes weights and measures, expanding commerce throughout the realms of China, increasing peaceful contacts between formerly warring states.
Nonetheless, Shi Huang’s unification of China hardly represents an end to warring states in China. His ‘Ba’ and imperial dynasty barely lasted a generation. To be sure, centralized imperial history after Qin rule is certainly long and impressive. After the Qin the Han rule for over four centuries (202bce-220ce), Sui (581-618)(4), Tang (618-907), Song (960-1279), Ming (1368-1644), Qing (1644-1912). The only state with any sustained centralized authority lasting nearly as long as China’s 2 or 4 thousands years was Egypt and that was more or less over before the common era and the Christian calendar even began. Still, my point, if you count all the gaps in China's imperial dynastic date ranges it adds up to over a quarter of the last two millennia in which the territorial heartland of China has been divided into warring states or multiple kingdoms; three kingdoms, sometimes five, ten, even as many as sixteen. It’s estimated that long before the Warring States period had boiled down to seven states there might have been as many as 100 vassal kingdoms under the Zhao Dynasty.
And if you look a little closer even the unity of several of the big states in China’s imperial history starts to break down. Peasant rebellions seem to pop up in Chinese history every generation or two. Halfway through the truly foundational Han Dynasty a 14-15 year-long rebellion based on peasant land reform pressures takes over. Halfway through Song rule, an imperial state whose astonishing urban revolution helped launch modern globalization, the capital was moved from the north to the south of China, fleeing hostility from the Jin Dynasty, another semi-nomadic horseback riding people, the Jurchen, menacing China from the northern steppes. As I’ve pointed out before, two of China’s greatest imperial states, the Yuan and the Qing, over 350 years of China’s last millennium, were under foreign control. Add this stuff to the 100-years of humiliation that preceded the CPC’s national independence victory in 1949 and the CPC’s paranoid nationalism starts to make a little more sense. But neither the Qin, or TAoW, or the classical Warring States seem to make a very strong case for achieving lasting Ba or resolving warring state conflicts militarily.
To the contrary, what TAoW and the best high school world history accounts seem to show instead is that China’s great centralized imperial history, its longevity, owes more to winning without fighting, winning by non-military means, via centralized administration and a large civil service of government workers, building unifying public works and absorbing cultural differences with building and organizing efficiencies. When the Mongols and Manchus take over China they make some changes, additions, but they end up mostly adopting China’s cultural traditions. The most important idea in TAoW, Shi, which Pillsbury leans on so heavily in his book, makes a weak case for achieving and sustaining military domination. TAoW’s best case as foreign policy and deterrence theory is ultimately about winning without fighting. Winning by non-military means, or via successful public administration.
Of course, the US must take counterintelligence measures to deter China or any other potentially hostile states from attacking the US, and vice versa. National security is constantly assessing and countering the military and nonmilitary threats from China or any other state or terrorist organization. The US Intelligence Community “officially” consists of 18 agencies and organizations that oversee national security and intelligence operations. Heaven knows counterintelligence work gets into all kinds of humanitarian abuses and assassinations and whatever murderous skullduggery, but the basic national security task is simple enough: defend the country from foreign threats. Deter our enemies from attacking us, or make it too costly and risky in human lives to attack us. We’ve pulled back a little from the nuclear doomsday scenarios of the Atomic Age but Mutually Assured Destruction or MAD in WMDs and weapons stockpiles still drives military defense budgets.
Pillsbury interestingly digs into the Social Darwinist-- i.e., survival of the fittest-- roots of the CPC and the ruling communist party in China. I’ve ran into this before. Social Darwinist thinking was big with Mao and his communist leadership comrades in the 1920s and 1930s. Overcoming foreign domination in China was a survival of the fittest contest to China’s communist revolutionaries. Undoubtably, this has lent a militarist top-down authoritarian style that has persisted in the CPC ever since. And which is also essentially Marxist-Lenninist, always cracking down on counter-revolutionary elements in society. But Pillsbury seems oblivious to the fact that Social Darwinism looms large in the perspective of American China hawks and the conservative movement in America he calls home. What is the China hawk position after all if not zero-sum, win/lose, everything is competition and combat and survival of the fittest Social Darwinism? I enjoyed Richard Hostadter’s book, Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), but his conclusion that Social Darwinism had been largely debunked in academic circles by the 1890s (and William James), while maybe true in Ivy League academic circles (where the importance of human cooperation to survival gets more due consideration), seemed to vastly undervalue the animating staying power of Social Darwinist thinking amongst business elites and local Chamber of Commerce conservatives.
By any measure Social Darwinism remains a major force in rationalizing predatory business practices to this day. What was Zuckerberg talking about in the ’24 election season when he called for more “masculine energies” and a celebration of aggressive business practices? The whole "Vibes Shift" thing during the election was a fuck the rules and regulations, or fuck others, Lina khan, competitors, workers, even consumers, fuck "empathy," let's takeover with our Manosphere-maxxing bigotry and make money. This is Musk’s recent Makers and Takers talk as well. It’s Social Darwinist, survival of the fittest doggerel, distilled for our times. The billionaire identifying himself as the fittest and the unfit his enemies. It really goes back to the very roots of modern capitalism in Malthus, early 19th century, showing sneering contempt for poor low wage workers or in the parlance today: NPCs (non-player characters, a gamer reference for characters that don’t matter, don’t count for anything). The unfit are unproductive, Takers, peasant idlers, Musk's "woke mind virus"-addled critics, they're all Takers. By contrast, Malthus' proto-capitalists or Captains of Industry and Musk are Makers. The broligarchs are the Makers, job creators, builders of empires, and only the Social Darwinist strong survive.
I’ve no doubt China could have something like a 100-year plan to achieve global power and preeminence. Deng was always talking about big long-term plans, although the ones I’ve seen tended to be made up mostly of macroeconomic goals. Anyway, five-year plans were a staple of states in the communist world in the 20th century. The 100-Year Marathon sounds like a grand secret plan of Marxist historical materialism, a century long scheme to take over the world and deliver the scientific socialist paradise. But come on there is no paradise without some basic respect for human rights and freedoms. My principal gripe here would be why do these utopian fantasies always seem to demand so many sacrifices from poor working people and never arrive? Always demanding a little bit more austerity and sacrifice to reach a promised land that remains forever out of reach. The CPC hardly has a monopoly on this kind of hypocrisy and disregard for the rights of the little people, I'm afraid. Anybody that believes that the AI singularity is going to liberate us all from ever having to work again is being silly, if not worse. At the very least, that China appears to be committed to fulfilling their goal of achieving world supremacy primarily by nonmilitary means strikes me as mildly encouraging.
Pillsbury is right that China is a paranoid nationalist state, obsessed with the independence of China and the supremacy of the CPC as the rightful sovereign guardians of that independence. And China routinely disregards the basic human rights of its citizens with surveillance and armed force; and bullies its neighbors, etc. Deterring China from attacking the US militarily, making it too risky and costly for China to attack the US militarily, especially when China is four or five times bigger than the US in population, will remain an important preoccupation of US military defense for the foreseeable future.
But the China hawks are always going to be fighting the cold war with China and urging the US to get tougher with China. The better Hawk case then Pillsbury's would have detailed more luridly some of China’s terrorism and espionage against the US. I’m sure there probably is some going on all the time. I’m just saying it might be wiser if in addition to basic weapons deterrence and all the saber-rattling, it might be wiser if the US gave more consideration to the actual teachings of TAoW and the principals of winning without fighting and thinking about ways soft power and win-win peaceful trade with China might improve relations and avoid the necessity or inevitability of armed conflict with China and WW3.
Notes:
(1) A big reason I’m so grateful for working journalists and scholars who do directly engage with the paranoid style on the right; who investigate and report on the bigot grievance ideology and propaganda machine of the rightwing. Their work are dispatches from the front in a long terrible war against the enlightenment and include many of my very favorite history books about the modern period. I mean, I really do want to know what the paranoid style on the right is thinking and doing. I’d just also rather avoid any personal contact with them. Including holiday family meals, for sure, but even crossing the street when you see a red MAGA hat coming. The ICE stuff on TV and streaming is fascist police state violence, no due process, no respect for human rights. ICE murders and kidnaps people, frequently not even people they were after, or not even undocumented immigrants. Trump threatens violence against anyone that opposes him. And MAGA, his voters, too dumb or not, endorse this assault. Not okay.
(2) Whatever exactly the Defense Policy Board is? Another secret panel in the bowels of the deep state? And another example of how both sides have their “deep states”? It’s either the liberal rule of law deep state (with its many flaws, to be sure) or the fascist dictator police-state crackdown deep state. The craziest part is how there’d be any sustainable support for the latter, which can only really increase conflict and violence. The paranoid right’s solutions, ethnic cleansing, segregation, and violently dominating other cultures or really anything or anybody that opposes their rule is war-all-the-time insanity. Civilized people want to solve social conflicts peacefully. Turning every conflict into another zero-sum violent war of military attrition ends in violent quagmires of poverty and multiplies social conflicts. In US history 'E Pluribus Unum' means ‘in many we are one,’ we unify, are one, in the axiomatic expression of the basic social fact of our human plurality and diversity. We are not subject to the rule of any one religion or race or class, although some very prominent billionaires, self-described as "Makers," demand otherwise. Humans want independence and freedom, it’s only human nature, but whatever independence and freedom we achieve will always still be in a world we share (or refuse to share) with others. Also, Project 2025 appears to me the biggest radical experiment in neoliberal economic shock therapy of them all. Way bigger than Chile or even Russia. I've seen little reporting about this angle so far on Trump 2.
(3) I don't doubt Hawkish sentiments rule the CPC or at minimum provide very close council to XiJinping. Chinese historical scholarship is a little extra weird or has its own quirks anyway. For one, the names are hard to follow for any non-Mandarin speaking English speaker. Many common names or terms in China’s history exist in at least two or three different English translations. Additionally, the literature in China’s political history was mostly produced by officially sanctioned imperial state historians. A central task of the new dynasty was to justify the loss of the Mandate of Heaven in the fallen dynasty and to legitimize the just rule of the new emperor in the terms of the Mandate of Heaven. Many simple inventions in China’s history, mortar and pestle, wheelbarrow, inventions that almost certainly emerged from the work of peasants, are routinely attributed to the mythic benevolence of some local lord or prince. Behind the scenes, there were bitter factional disputes between Confucian and Buddhist scholars, Confucian and Eunuch government officials, on and on. More history written by the winners, I guess. But interpreting China’s history presents its own problems, my only point. Pillsbury’s fluency in Mandarin and many years in the country give his account more credibility. But his handling of the concepts in TAoW seems so shallow and manipulative.
(4) My first reactions to Tim Weiner’s Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) or, more recently, Vincent Bevin’s The Jarkarta Method (2020), were something like OMG, drunken untreated-PTSD combat guys doing “intelligence,” getting off on killing “communists,” who way more often than not turn out to be democratically elected socialists, or just nationalist independence leaders and poor farmers and union workers and too many innocent civilian bystanders. The number of grotesque humanitarian crimes is staggering and shameful. I’m not saying there weren’t any bad communists or communist police state dictatorships out there attempting to sabotage and/or weaken the US but it is striking how much US cold war counterintelligence history was always about propping up military dictatorships. Another striking detail that stays with me is how Eisenhower expressed deep regrets about the way the CIA was setup after WW2, built mostly out of retired covert military operations and not more out of language and cultural intelligence professionals. The history of the CIA counterintelligence in Legacy of Ashes is pockmarked by savagely bungled military operations.
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