One of the US government’s leading China experts reveals 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. Michael Pillsbury, a fluent Mandarin speaker who has served in senior national security positions in the US government since the days of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, draws on his decades of contact with the “hawks” in China’s military and intelligence agencies and translates their documents, speeches, and books to show how the teachings of traditional Chinese statecraft underpin their actions. He offers an inside look at how the Chinese really view America and its leaders—as barbarians who will be the architects of their own demise.
Pillsbury also explains how the US government has helped—sometimes unwittingly and sometimes deliberately—to make this “China Dream” come true, and he calls 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. The Hundred-Year Marathon is a wake-up call as we face the greatest national security challenge of the twenty-first century.
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“Michael Pillsbury has been meeting with, talking to, and studying the ‘hawks’ in China’s military and intelligence apparatus for more than four decades, since back when America and China were cooperating against the Soviet Union. In this fascinating, provocative new book, he lays out the hawks’ views about the United States and their long-term strategies for overcoming American power by the middle of this century. In the process, the book challenges the wrong-headed assumptions in Washington about a gradually reforming China. Given the direction China has been taking in the past few years, Pillsbury’s book takes on immediate relevance.”
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James Mann, New York Times bestselling author