The Washington Free Beacon reported on a new book by Pentagon China specialist Michael Pillsbury, a Mandarin-speaking analyst who has worked China policy and intelligence issues for every U.S. administration since Nixon. The book is called “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”. New details from the FBI, CIA, Defense Department which include formerly classified presidential directives, previously unknown Chinese defector testimony and disturbing details from powerful Chinese military and political hawks were cleared for publication.
The secret strategy, seeks a large-scale transfer of cash, technology, and expertise with the goal of catching and ultimately surpassing the United States. Allegedly the deception plan based on ancient Chinese statecraft was launched by Mao Zedong in 1955.
Key points include:
- Chinese hardliners promoted the book of Col. Liu Mingfu, “The China Dream” that is the inspiration behind current Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s increasingly Maoist policies. Other writings by hawks reveal a future China-dominated world will that values “order over freedom, ethics over law and elite governance over democracy and human rights.”
- U.S. intelligence agencies for decades underestimated the influence of Chinese hawks and continue to dismiss their power and influence as “fringe” elements.
- Intelligence assessments in the late 1980s failed to recognize the pro-democracy sentiment inside the ruling Politburo was strong until it was crushed after the 1989 crackdown on dissent.
- Reagan agreed to sell six major weapons systems to China but required that continued aid be conditioned on China remaining unaligned with Moscow and liberalizing its communist system. The arms transfers were halted after Tiananmen.
- World Bank assistance to China imposed no conditions on China moving toward free market reforms. As a result, China’s government today continues to control most industries.
- China will undermine the United Nations and World Trade Organization to “delegitimize” the U.S.-led world order in order to promote its global system.
- An internal secret briefing for Chinese officials discussed China’s most important foreign policy priority as “how to manage the decline of the United States,” revealing that China is working against U.S. interests in supporting rogue states and selling arms to America’s enemies.
Pillsbury was a staunch advocate of “constructive engagement” toward China. He abandoned his pro-China, views mainly after “Tiananmen Square” He said, “We believed that American aid to a fragile China whose leaders thought like us would help China become a democratic and peaceful power without ambitions of regional or even global dominance.,”
Pillsbury continued, “Every one of the assumptions behind that belief was wrong—dangerously so.”
The same sort of dangerous assumption are being made about Iran.