Back to Cold War Part III: For Decades, China’s Been Readying for a “Hot War”
This is Part III of a three-part article. Part I was published on April 30, 2020 and Part II on May 5, 2020.
For decades, China has invested in an arsenal of unconventional weapons rooted in high technology to exploit the weakest spots in every major American weapons system. When the Chinese threatened Taiwan, President William Clinton sent carrier groups into the waters of the region with overwhelming naval and air power. The Chinese realized that they could not begin to compete. And so, in the years since, Mr. Pillsbury shows, in detail, China has invented or stolen weapons systems with the singular goal of disabling a carrier group without going against it face-to-face.
The Chinese focus on cyberattacks, on disrupting command and control of military and civilian infrastructure.
And this is true for all American military systems. The Chinese focus on cyberattacks, on disrupting command and control of military and civilian infrastructure. Another target of this unconventional technology is American satellites that carry almost 90 percent of military communication, including tracking, guiding, and directing ships and aircraft. What China has accomplished in every area is impressive.
Yes, the U.S. military is aware of this. Mr. Pillsbury hardly could have information that they do not have. He has been involved for decades in advising the military and even participating in war games at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. He is notably the only “opponent” to prevail over America repeatedly in these war games by following in detail the lessons of the Chinese “Warring States” period.
America’s military leaders have stated that new Chinese weapons or tactics, now in existence and stockpiled, present threats to which they have no counter. American bombers have a system for identifying and shooting down ground-launched missiles; China has invented a system for hurling 10,000 simultaneous identical signals mimicking incoming missiles at a plane, among which the real missile is hidden. American technology has no response. The aircraft carrier groups heading to China, for real war, will be met by rocket-propelled torpedoes traveling at terrific speeds. No present defense. China has midget parasite satellites that will attach themselves to U.S. communications satellites, stealing their data and disabling their signal.
Relatively cheap, precisely targeted: a bomber versus a signal box, an innovative torpedo versus an aircraft carrier, a miniature satellite versus major communications satellites. It is mostly technology, knowledge, tactics—not vast armadas of hardware, missiles, ships, tanks. The spending has been huge, but the product not highly visible. Above all, it does not go up against U.S. military power head-to-head. There is no politically alarming “missile gap,” here; no naval arms race America is losing; and no disturbing comparison of bomber fleets.
China specializes in cyberspace—hugely. Its theft of U.S. data, business intelligence, and technology has made an estimated 10 percent to 15 percent contribution to its economic growth. In the military arena, China specializes in superiority in attacking communications infrastructure, military and economic, by disrupting the command and control by which modern wars are fought. No heavy-duty weapons, no massed tanks and bombers. Those are the strength of the United States. Victories, according to the Warring States strategy, require attacking weakness, using the enemy’s strength against him, emphasizing guile and deception, and never revealing true strength, targets, and goals until the perfect time to strike arises—the time of greatest strength of the rising power, the greatest vulnerability of the hegemon.
Starting in 2007, as Mr. Pillsbury sees it, communist China began a series of provocations, including military, to probe America’s willingness to stand up to China.
Starting in 2007, communist China began a series of provocations, including military, to probe America’s willingness to stand up to China. In that year, China used a ballistic missile to destroy one of America’s weather satellites. It was another brazen “first” for China, creating a huge cloud of orbiting debris putting other satellites—and human space travel—at heightened risk for years to come. When no effective response was forthcoming, China’s affronts became more brazen. China protested so threateningly against America’s long-standing arms sales to Taiwan that President Obama cancelled the next one. China took aggressive steps to extend its territorial waters almost to the coasts of Vietnam and the Philippines. China exerted its military might in a dispute with Japan over islands and encouraged rioters around Japan’s embassy compound in Beijing. Every failure of American resolve was a “win” for China.
“China’s increased assertiveness,” writes Mr. Pillsbury, “is a product of Chinese leaders’ recognition that shi [the flow of power in the world] has shifted decisively in China’s favor and America’s relative decline has accelerated faster than they anticipated. A Politburo session about which the U.S. obtained information asked what China’s biggest challenge would be over the next decade. The answer was “how to manage the decline of the United States.”
Chinese military strategists were thrilled by 9/11. Nineteen men with no weapons but box cutters had used deception, guile, and timing to use the hegemon’s technology, vulnerability, to strike a blow that above all was psychologically devastating. That illustrated the enduring beauty of the Warring States strategy. It illustrated all that China hoped to achieve on a world scale by 2049, the year of vengeance, of putting the “century of humiliation” forever behind, of restoring the ancient and glorious “heavenly kingdom” to hegemony.
Mr. Pillsbury has recommendations. But I will pause here to report something that thrilled me, but will leave others cold. Completing The Hundred-year Marathon, I looked up Michael Pillsbury in Wikipedia. He has all the credentials mentioned in the book—and much more. But then, I read that “U.S. President Donald Trump described Michael Pillsbury as ‘the leading authority on China.’ On November 30, 2018, The New York Times, Politico, and Bloomberg articles asserted Michael Pillsbury’s importance of being one of Trump’s top advisers on China.” That will not lift every spirit, and dim some, but it vastly lifted mine.
So what advice is Mr. Pillsbury offering to President Trump and our China policy community?
So what advice is Mr. Pillsbury offering to President Trump and our China policy community? The preface is that it is easier to win a race when you are the only one who knows you are racing. And that is the weakness of America, today. The first step is to wake up. This was written before 2015, when the book was published; now, we know that President Trump has “read the book.” It is not too late. America defeated the other aspirant for world domination, Soviet communism. And so the advice:
- See the real China, not the one Beijing’s autocrats have created with gigantic cost and effort, for U.S. consumption. Chillingly, Mr. Pillsbury comments that very recently Chinese military leaders have made boasting references to the 100-year plan, its success, and the total failure of U.S. intelligence. Perhaps, Mr. Pillsbury speculates, they are convinced it is too late for the U.S. to stop them.
- Keep track of our gifts to China. Each year, a fortune in American dollars aids China’s rise. But no record is kept, says Mr. Pillsbury, of total annual “assistance” to China by the U.S. government. One Congressional attempt to get an annual report was met by China “advisors” with the warning that any reduction threatens to “set back three decades our relationship with China.” An annual accounting might support a useful argument to the Chinese public that it is not America’s mission to “hold back China.”
- Keep track of competitiveness of the U.S. versus China because of the adage: What you measure improves.
- Develop a competitiveness strategy. Be open-minded about the need to change strategies. And by the way, how encouraged are you that the great “capitalist” economy, moving into the future, will remain competitive and thus undergird our military strength and national security? It wasn’t a debt-ridden, over-regulated, taxed, quasi-socialist America that stood down the Soviet Union.
- Find common ground at home. Struggling among factions in the United States should stop. We should be united in determination to change China. Unfortunately, factions in the United States agree on nothing. We are amidst our own almost “civil war” over the policy of our own government.
- Build a coalition of nations. China’s greatest strategic fear is “encirclement” and that should be the U.S strategy with all states surrounding China.
- Protect political dissidents in China. Liu Xiaobo was a Nobel Peace Prize laureate who called for political reforms and an end to communist one-party rule in China. He died in 2017 after years in prison. We yielded to China’s argument that its hardliners must not be provoked, so none of our gifts, cooperation, or other largess were conditioned on the treatment of dissidents. U.S. support for dissidents against Soviet communism—Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn—made constant headlines. Not Chinese dissidents.
- Stand up to anti-American mercantilist conduct. I think such a policy has guided President Donald Trump from the beginning of his presidency. He has taken heat for it from his right-wing, pro-capitalist, free trade supporters. But in some form, the grossly anti-American mercantilist raids by China should meet resistance. Mr. Pillsbury documents communist China’s violation of every single agreement it undertook to join the World Trade Organization. And it issued bald-faced lying denials of every violation. China has assisted Iran, Pakistan, and North Korea with their nuclear weapons programs, denying it all. It helped to arm the Taliban both before and after 9/11. Summing it up, Mr. Pillsbury says that any country or group in the world that attacks America, militarily or otherwise, becomes the recipient of sustained Chinese help. The CCP has a single goal: weaken America in the world.
- Identify and shame polluters. Mr. Pillsbury sees this as a way the Chinese economy should be held to the same standards as other economies in the World Trade Organization.
- Expose corruption and censorship. The Chinese Communist Party has recognized that corruption is endemic in its system, that cronyism brings riches to party families, relatives, and friends. There seems no cure. That corruption and totalitarian control of the party over all freedom of expression ought to be known to the world as the “cost” of China’s “success.”
- Support pro-democracy reformers. Amazingly courageous individuals in China go on advocating what is right, broadly termed “democracy” (political freedom), and have done so whatever the costs. China encourages its “friends” (China scholars, any foreign company in China, any beneficiary of dealing with China) to remain silent about dissidents, pro-democracy reformers, and unmentionable episodes in China’s history.
- Be as aware, and involved, in the debates between Chinese “hawks” and true reformers as the Chinese Communist Party is aware in detail of its “friends” and “enemies” in every sector in America.
A final word from Mr. Pillsbury: “The first step, recognizing that this is a marathon, may be the most difficult to take, but is also the most important. America may fail to recognize the problem and refuse to face the long-term scenario of China not only surpassing us but then growing to double and triple the size of our economy, by 2049. Then, China will have won, by default.”
How do you react to these dozen recommendations? My first thought is that they assume essential normality in relations between the Chinese dictatorship and America. We trade, we compete, we let our journalists criticize, we try to enforce standards through international organizations such as the WTO and World Bank. We do the same in our relationship with France or Australia. The only difference would be that as a government and a people we would recognize that China views itself as our successor. And we would be tougher in insisting on international legal norms, and, as so often are urged, to be more forthright about our “values” (democracy, toleration).
By implication, we would not proceed on the premise that the world’s most populous dictatorship is a life-and-death threat to a free nation. What about using our military superiority now, while we have it, to demand that China stop preparing for war against us? Stop, or prepare for war? Of course, we may not have this option; China now holds trillions of dollars of our debt, more than any nation but Japan, and the low-priced goods it has supplied have enabled us to wildly inflate our money supply without as yet bringing about rocketing consumer price inflation.
America could declare that we do not conduct business with a dictatorship, and we are canceling our debt to China based on all it has stolen. But for decades in calm, civilized good faith we sold our burgeoning debt to China—borrowing back trillions that the Chinese worked hard to earn by selling us stuff—to support spending we otherwise could not afford. Now, suddenly, we do not deal with dictatorships?
All right, no military threat. No debt cancellation. Suppose we just declare that we no longer want to conduct normal relations, including trade, with an aggressive dictatorship? No more trade until China reforms its politics. But we owe China trillions we cannot pay back. All leading American companies have locations in China and are doing business, there. They have relied upon American policy, as China has relied on American policy to take our debt.
How about using Warring States strategy? Deception has been the byword of China policy for decades. China’s strength has been dissimulating, lying, stealing, promulgating false narratives at a cost of billions. Its success has rested on creating an enduring misconception of itself and its strategies and goals. That has been China’s strength; it has gotten China all that it could not have obtained in aid, cooperation, membership in international organizations, and much more.
What are China’s weakest points? Where is it most vulnerable? And the answer is that it is vulnerable to truth. To exposure.
And so, we may ask what are China’s weakest points? Where is it most vulnerable? And the answer is that it is vulnerable to truth. To exposure. To an open exchange of information and ideas. Against those, it does not have the essential defense—truth and honesty. It has only its determination and vast bureaucratic apparatus devoted to creating and defending by any means the falsehoods that serve the Chinese Communist Party, the 100-year marathon, that deceive the reigning hegemon, America.
Obviously, things have changed since the publication in 2015 of The 100-year Marathon. In 2016, Mr. Trump chose Mr. Pillsbury as his chief advisor on policy toward China. And, in 2017, Graham Allison, former director of the Harvard Kennedy School, published a book based on a study of previous clashes of superpowers with rising aspirants to superpower. Destined for War: How America and China Can Avoid the Thucydides Trap reached hopeful recommendations for heading off war between China and the United States. Savvy Street reviewed the book, which had been hailed in dozens of major reviews.
I do not imply for a moment that Mr. Pillsbury has not brought up and urged attention to areas of competition where a free, open, democratic republic has a decisive advantage over the paranoid, secretive, deception-obsessed communist leadership in Beijing. The evidence and implications are everywhere.
In fact, if we intend to attack China’s weaknesses, then Mr. Pillsbury’s book is at the heart of the strategy. The battle is over ideas and how they are communicated. How they penetrate the defenses and disincentives that the Chinese authoritarians erect to block them and discourage them.
Mr. Pillsbury’s book accomplishes that. It is uncompromising in its report on how long and in how many ways the leaders of China have systematically deceived their people and through them, us. With what gravity of historical and cultural intent, China’s leaders have sought to control truth itself as a weapon in the long-term battle for Chinese world hegemony.
If this were known in America, recognized and accepted, then the Chinese communist dictatorship’s pivotal advantage—the deception at the heart of its plans—would be negated. Mr. Pillsbury fully characterizes the forces arrayed against that strategy. How the Chinese Communist Party will fight it on a thousand battlefronts.
Telling the truth, exposing the deception, are Pillsbury’s motive and triumphant accomplishment, but not a magical solution. Not salvation.
But he does arm the friends of freedom, capitalism, American greatness, and the Western tradition of reason and individualism with weapons that always prevail—facts, truth, and reality. Always prevail if they are heard long enough, loudly enough, and clearly enough. They are not salvation, they are the tools with which to begin a long, very tough task.
President Trump could exert heroic influence by telling the world, on repeated occasions, that Mr. Pillsbury’s book is his guide to relations with China. Endorsing it, and Mr. Pillsbury, would force the media to read, report, analyze, and debate the book. Once the opponents of truth are brought to the table to debate it directly, the truth has won.
About the Author: Walter Donway
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