Photo credit: Tony Powell
China: “It’s complicated” – as they say on Facebook when referring to relationships. Such is the case of US-China relations. But if timing is everything, then Michael Pillsbury hit the jackpot. The author’s book The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower is the Bible of China-America relations. “It’s a wake-up call as we face the greatest national security challenge of the twenty-first century as noticed most recently by the North Korean – China buddy system,” Pillsbury told Hollywood on the Potomac at an intimate salon type book signing at the home of Jane and Calvin Cafritz with an eclectic guest list that included diplomats, former Chiefs of Protocol and where conversations were overhead in Russian and Mandarin; so being a fly on the wall would have proved useless.
Susan Pillsbury, Calvin Cafritz, Michael Pillsbury and Jane Cafritz
Michael Pillsbury is a defense policy adviser, former government official, author of books on China and one of the US government’s leading China experts. In The Hundred-Year Marathon he explains the hidden strategy fueling that country’s rise – and how Americans have been seduced into helping China overtake us as the world’s leading superpower. “For more than forty years, the United States has played an indispensable role helping the Chinese government build a booming economy, develop its scientific and military capabilities, and take its place on the world stage, in the belief that China’s rise will bring us cooperation, diplomacy, and free trade. But what if the “China Dream” is to replace us, just as America replaced the British Empire, without firing a shot? Based on interviews with Chinese defectors and newly declassified, previously undisclosed national security documents, The Hundred-Year Marathon reveals China’s secret strategy to supplant the United States as the world’s dominant power, and to do so by 2049, the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People’s Republic.” MacMillan USA
Pillsbury drew on his decades of contact with the “hawks” in China’s military and intelligence agencies to mesmerize guests while reciting names of people they knew from Kissinger to Nixon to Reagan to Oliver North. Washington is, after all, a small town where if you travel in the same or overlapping circles you eventually rub elbows with all the players. He talked about Kissinger’s secret mission to China; Ambassador to China Winston Lord’s (a distant cousin) response to Kissinger’s memos on China; about his meeting with diplomats from the Chinese Mission with whom he lunched at The Metropolitan Club because the Chinese had Metropolitan Club privileges “because nothing was too good for the Chinese military and intelligence in those days.” Pillsbury recanted stories and situations that are only now declassified while explaining how the U.S. government has helped – sometimes unwittingly and sometimes deliberately– to make this China Dream come true, and he called for the United States to implement a new, more competitive strategy toward China as it really is, and not as we might wish it to be.
Former Chief of Protocol Lucky Roosevelt with artist Bill Dunlap
One guest asked during the panel discussion moderated by Calvin Cafritz: “I wanted to ask you, has the way the US interpreted the actions of China a failure of security?” To which Pillsbury responded: “Well, over time, we misinterpreted China. Over time we missed that a lot of the advice that the Russians had given us in jokes turned out to be more accurate than anybody realized at the time. The Chinese had ambitions of their own, [as well as] those through our own kind of wishful thinking.” The Russians want to know – ‘Are the Chinese going to buy us, or are they our best friends and we can rule the world together?’ “You find there are various Russians on both sides of this debate. I think the reception has been very interesting. The academic world is fascinated by the footnotes. All this new stuff – these Chinese materials, the declassified documents.”
Michael Pillsbury and Susan Eisenhower catch up on history
About his next project, Pillsbury said: “The next book is going to be more about Chinese culture; how Chinese culture and history shaped the way they think. The most shocking chapter for me in here is the one called America the Great Satan. In the textbooks, Chinese college students are all being taught that the Americans are out to get China; they want to contain us and circle us, overthrow our party because they’re very competitive people. When did this all begin? The textbooks say it all began with Abraham Lincoln.” Abraham Lincoln? Say what? “I’m going to do some more I think on Chinese culture, as insight into their strategic thinking. I think that’s constructive. If the two sides could reduce misconceptions, we have a chance. If we go at the course we’re going on now, with Americans being very giddy and underestimating Chinese nationalism and thinking that China loves us, everybody loves us while doing naval patrols into their territorial waters without explanation at night, and because the Chinese have their misconceptions that we are out to throttle them since Abraham Lincoln, then this is a recipe for disaster, or real trouble. I’m not the only person who thinks this. Reducing misconceptions is a good thing, but I think those who know some Chinese and have the kind of access I do to get these materials, have a responsibility to try to reduce misconceptions between our government and their government.”
Michael Pillsbury and Calvin Cafritz
“It’s quite a mystery,” Pillsbury told Hollywood on the Potomac after the discussion when we asked him where US-China relations were going. “The Chinese tell us they don’t have that much influence in North Korea and they’re doing the best they can and they oppose nuclear weapons in North Korea; so the Chinese are very positive about how they would like to help us. On the other hand, they seem to have a choke hold on North Korea’s oil pipeline, food and credit so I tend to believe – just speaking personally – that the Chinese have a lot more influence in North Korea than they say they do. If The Hundred-Year Marathon is correct, the Chinese need American support and investment for at least thirty more years; so they at least like to keep up the appearance of working with us. I think that what John Kerry (Secretary of State) was trying to do in Beijing a week and a half ago was to encourage the Chinese; but it’s not working. We have been trying this now since 2002, but only one time, one day, did they try to turn off the pipeline to North Korea. The Chinese did that and the North Koreans became more reasonable. So some of us, including me, think that the Chinese are able to put pressure on North Korea. They have not done so yet. It’s part of my chapter in The Hundred-Year Marathon about their kind of paranoid fears of America. They’ve got a theory that they have sometimes shared with us that America has a strategy to reunite Korea and the move US forces up to North Korea onto the Chinese border.”
The Ambassador of Japan and Mrs. Sasae
To easily understand the influence of the Chinese, we have reduced it to three words: “Made in China.”
“The Hundred-Year Marathon is a wake-up call as we face the greatest national security challenge of the twenty-first century.” Michael Pillsbury:
