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September 15 - October 12, 2018
The Chinese must talk loudly to make the tonal differences audible.
The English language uses ten thousand different syllables, but Chinese has only four hundred.
these hawks had been advising Chinese leaders, beginning with Mao Zedong, to avenge a century of humiliation and aspired to replace the United States as the economic, military, and political leader of the world by the year 2049 (the one hundredth anniversary of the Communist Revolution). This plan became known as “the Hundred-Year Marathon.”
these hard-line views are not fringe, but are very much in the mainstream of Chinese geostrategic thought.
of the fourteen imperial dynasties, ten have each lasted longer than the entire history of the United States.”
The nine principal elements of Chinese strategy, which form the basis of the Hundred-Year Marathon, include the following:
1. Induce complacency to avoid alerting your opponent.
2. Manipulate your opponent’s advisers.
3. Be patient—for decades, or longer—to achieve victory.
4. Steal your opponent’s ideas and technology for strategic purposes.
5. Military might is not the critical factor for winning a long-term competition.
6. Recognize that the hegemon will take extreme, even reckless action to retain its dominant position.
7. Never lose sight of shi.
two elements of shi are critical components of Chinese strategy: deceiving others into doing your bidding for you, and waiting for the point of maximum opportunity to strike.
8. Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers.
9. Always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others.
In 1979, a Chinese weapons designer developed China’s one-child policy.
We memorized a well-known proverb intended to sum up Chinese history: wai ru, nei fa (on the outside, be benevolent; on the inside, be ruthless).
One of the most famous stories from the Warring States period begins with a tale of two neighboring kingdoms, one rising, one falling in relative power: Chu and Zhou. As the leader of Chu reviewed his troops with a member of the declining Zhou dynasty along their mutual border, he couldn’t resist asking the size and weight of the cauldrons in the Zhou royal palace.
The lesson is famous in China: “Never ask the weight of the emperor’s cauldrons.” In other words, don’t let the enemy know you’re a rival, until it is too late for him to stop you.
Warring States literature and other folklore stories of Chinese cultural heroes have also stressed the importance of stealing ideas and technology from the opponent.
A famous strategy was to deplete an adversary’s financial resources by tricking it into spending too much on its military.
Americans tend to believe that relations with other countries ebb and flow between periods of competition and cooperation; Beijing’s assumption is that the U.S. government has a long-standing policy of hostility and deception toward the Chinese government.
At the heart of Chinese strategy is shi, which is a difficult concept to explain to a Western audience. It cannot be directly translated into English, but Chinese linguists describe it as “the alignment of forces” or “propensity of things to happen,” which only a skilled strategist can exploit to ensure victory over a superior force. Similarly, only a sophisticated adversary can recognize how he is vulnerable to the exploitation of shi.17 It is exactly the lack of recognition of the potential exploitation of shi that is dooming American strategy toward China.
A close approximation to shi in American popular culture is “the force” from George Lucas’s Star Wars, which draws heavily on Eastern philosophy.
A dangerous implication of this emerges when China expects the United States to behave like an aggressive hegemon eager to retain its dominant position; when the Americans instead promote détente, the UN Charter, and democracy and human rights for all, China gets suspicious. What are the Americans really up to? Perhaps some among China’s moderates and reformists understand America’s good intentions. The hawks, however, see only American deception.
Beijing sent a secret message to Nixon and Kissinger: since President Nixon had already visited Belgrade and Bucharest—capitals of other Communist countries—he would also be welcome in Beijing.
Nixon did not first reach out to China; instead, China, in the person of Mao, first reached out to Nixon. The Americans just didn’t realize it. Nor did Washington yet know that Chinese documents called America the enemy and likened it to Hitler.
China would come from behind and win the Marathon by stealthily drawing most of its energy from the complacent American front-runner.
Dalai Lama—Public Enemy Number One to Communist China
First, the Chinese emphasized that we had to identify key Soviet vulnerabilities to exploit. One tactic, they explained, was to raise the cost of empire.
Deng Xiaoping declared martial law and rushed 250,000 troops into the Chinese capital.
A lone man stood in the path of a row of tanks in an iconic image of the massacre. He was pulled away by a group of people—never to be heard from again.
No one I worked with at the CIA or the Pentagon in the 1980s raised the idea that China could deceive the United States or be the cause of a major intelligence failure.
Ms. Green solved the problem. We sided with her and provided the money she requested.
After his victory over Bush in the 1992 presidential election, Clinton took the hardest line on China of any U.S. president since Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson.
Protests in China are rarely spontaneous, which was why the Tiananmen Square demonstrations a decade earlier had been so frightening to the country’s leaders.
“I have instructions not to translate nationalistic stuff.”
China’s technological progress depended on nearly one hundred agreements with the United States for scientific exchange programs.
Tiananmen Square massacre—which occurred a mere two hundred yards from the museum that doesn’t mention it.7
After 1989, Deng chose to align with Li Peng and other hard-liners to solidify Party control. Never again, the leaders vowed, would China’s students build Statues of Liberty, quote from the Declaration of Independence, and look to America’s values as admirable alternatives to those of the Chinese Communist Party. Within a year, textbooks had been rewritten to cast America as China’s archvillain, and new policies and regulations ensured that only this official view of America made it into China’s classrooms and libraries.
the latest Chinese version ...
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Chinese authors warned me in June 2012 that the purportedly secret anti-China plans of Barack Obama were well known in Beijing.
they assume America will act as selfishly, cynically, and ruthlessly as did every hegemon in the era of the Warring States.
a carefully managed, secret, and audacious PR and opinion-shaping operation, supervised by top leaders in Beijing, is still under way. It is an operation that intelligence officials have known about for many years.
“If you want to control the whole world, you better not appear as being ambitious. Show no aspiration for greatness. If you appear as having an agenda you will be revealed … the success of [Goujian] is a good example.”
“Let me ask you something,” he replied. “Have you ever discussed your book [referring to this book] on e-mail?”
Some analysts estimate that there are more than seven hundred Chinese journalists working in the United States today. Many of them are considered “propagandists” for spreading China’s favored views or actual Chinese intelligence agents who monitor those considered anti-China within the United States.
four main strategies that the Chinese utilize to influence or manipulate the Western media.
Direct action by Chinese diplomats, local officials, security forces, and regulators, both inside and outside China.
