Michael Pillsbury Does Not Think China Is So Benign Anymore

choi

Howard W French, Panda Hugger Turned Slugger. For years, Pillsbury’s view fit the Washington consensus: China, with the help of the US, would become a peaceful power. No longer. Wall Street Journal, Feb 27, 2015
www.wsj.com/articles/book-review ... illsbury-1424996150
(book review on Michael Pillsbury, The Hundred-Year Marathon; China's secret strategy to replace America as the global superpower. Manhattan: Henry Holt, 2015)

My comment:
(a) This is a book about China turning aggressive, a common theme for a while. What is notable is the authorship.
(b)
(i) Michael Pillsbury  白邦瑞
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Pillsbury
(1945- ; "During the Reagan administration, Pillsbury was the Assistant Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning and responsible for implementation of the program of covert aid known as the Reagan Doctrine [qv; Pillsbury IMPLEMENTED, not devised the Doctrine]. In 1975-76, while an analyst at the RAND Corporation, Pillsbury published articles in Foreign Policy and International Security recommending that the United States establish intelligence and military ties with China")
(ii) The English surname Pillsbury: name of "a place in Derbyshire, so named from the genitive of the Old English personal name Pil + burh ‘fortified place’"

(c) This "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."
(i) thrum (vi; imitative): "to sound with a monotonous hum"
www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/thrum
(ii) I knew it from childhood that China sought to return to its old glory--under the leadership of Taiwan, of course, which claimed, and wanted to reclaim, all of China. Sadly and little by little, we (Taiwanese) realized in 1880s this was an impossible dream. Moving to the opposite pole, we gave up on 9the claim over) China and have since turned inward. This perspective makes me wonder whether Mr Pillsbury is a China hand at all. See also (e).

(d) "This world [China as center of tianxia, or universe] 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"

Not a decade--a year instead.

(e) "In Mr Pillsbury’s telling, the US 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 US 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.  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 BC, 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.'
(i) I came to US in 1984 to University of Illinois at Chicago. I could sense the fervent of university administration to bring more Chinese students from China (somewhat at the expense of Taiwan, in terms of admission and scholarship). I never asked why. However, educating Chinese to counter Soviet Union did not occur to me. My conclusion was, because that is what the University said openly and repeatedly, to train Chinese so that they could return home and modernize China, in all aspects. About the same zeal and conviction that brought missionaries to China in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century. Missionaries were disappointed before, and it appears now some Americans turn ambivalent.
(ii) Every middle school student in Taiwan knows 韜光養晦, because the phrase is in the textbook. We do not know its origin(s). I just search Taiwanese websites, which says the phrase originates from:
"(1)孔融雜合詩：玫璇隱曜，美玉韜光。  (玫ㄇㄟˊ美石。璇ㄒㄩㄢˊ，美玉。曜ㄧㄠˋ，光芒。)
(2)宋史邢(ㄒㄧㄥˊ)恕傳：養晦以待時。
(3)清˙鄭觀應˙盛世危言˙序：自顧年老才庸，粗知易理，亦急擬獨善潛修，韜光養晦。"
請問輡光養晦昰什麼意思呢？ Yahoo!奇摩知識, Nov 8, 2005.
tw.knowledge.yahoo.com/question/question;_ylt=AwrwNFh.EfJUCm4AyDJr1gt.?qid=1405110812191

(f) "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."

The last clause insinuated that if Mao kept the friendship, superficially, with Soviets, China could have sucked Soviet Union dry.

(g) "The US 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."
(i) Alastair Iain Johnston, Department of Governor,Harvard University, undated
www.gov.harvard.edu/people/faculty/iain-johnston
(ii) Ames, Roger T  安樂哲, CCS [Center for Chinese Studies] Faculty, Professor of Philosophy, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, Oct 1, 2010.
www.ccs-uhm.org/ames-roger-t/
(iii) M Taylor Fravel, Associate Professor of Political Science, MIT, undated.
web.mit.edu/polisci/people/faculty/m-taylor-fravel.html