Archives for September 2021

Thomas Hegghammer: The Caravan: Abdallah Azzam and the Rise of Global Jihad. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020.

“This book is about why jihadism went global,” written through the prism of the life of Abdallah Azzam, the Palestinian Arab instrumental in organizing “the world’s first truly global foreign-fighter mobilization,” which occurred in 1980s Afghanistan in response to the 1979 Soviet invasion. “The Soviet-Afghan war is the cradle of today’s jihadi movement,” the event which nurtured new leaders (including Azzam and Osama bin Laden), new fighters, intra-jihadi networks, and Islamist ideology. In Iran, jihadis had successfully targeted the secularist regime of the Shah. But in the Arab countries regimes both secular and religious proved harder to subvert. “Jihadism went global in the 1980s because [Arab] Islamists had been excluded from domestic politics in preceding decades” and accordingly “turned to an arena in which they faced less government interference—namely, transnational activism for pan-Islamic causes.” Men like Azzam and bin Laden channeled this activist passion into military organizations, urging Muslim youth to “join the Caravan,” head to Afghanistan, and make war for Allah.

Hegghammer wants to know several things about Azzam: Who was he? That is, “where did he come from, and what shaped him as a thinker?” “What motivated the big decisions in his life? And what were his opinions?” “Why was he so influential?” And how did he and his associates organize their movement?

Azzam was born into a family of jihadis; his father had fought against the British, whose empire encompassed Palestine, having taken it over from the Ottomans. In his childhood he saw members of the Muslim Brotherhood from around the Middle East who joined with Palestinian Arabs to fight the Israel as soon as it was founded in 1948. While this was an international conflict, as the Afghan war would prove to be, decades later, it was regional, not global, organized by states not ‘non-state actors.’ Most of the foreign fighters were “not especially religious,” unlike the Brothers. Azzam later wrote, “True Islam did not enter the battles of 1948.” Nonetheless, “To Azzam…the war of 1948 had offered a glimpse of what the Islamist movement could achieve militarily if it were not obstructed by governments and if it collaborated across borders.”

The youth joined the Brotherhood in 1954, going on to study Islamic law at Damascus University, where he graduated in 1966, a year after his marriage. The Six-Day War of 1967 “was a turning point in Azzam’s life,” making him a refugee and spurring his passion for revenge. As many have noticed, the war also injured the prestige of the secularist Arab regimes, making Islamism more appealing to the masses. And Azzam was far from the only displaced Palestinian Arab; he was among several hundred thousand who joined the 700,000 displaced in the aftermath of 1948. With the Israeli takeover of Jerusalem, Muslim militants gained a focus for their cause; the struggle was no longer simply a question of reclaiming those parts of Palestine ruled by Israelis and the Hashemites of Jordan, but of reclaiming the third holiest city of Islamdom. For this reason, Azzam would always maintain that “Palestine is more important than Afghanistan,” even as he recruited fighters against the Soviets in the 1980s. Indeed, he regarded Afghanistan as a solid potential base for (in his words) “found[ing] a core around which a big Muslim army can be gathered to cleanse the earth of the big corruption,” of which the Jewish occupation of Jerusalem was a major symptom and symbol. Being an Islamist, he had no use for the Palestine Liberation Organization of Yasir Arafat, “whom he saw as godless traitors” to the cause of Islam. He remained loyal to the Brothers.

“Azzam’s Brotherhood background is crucial for understanding his subsequent activities; it shaped not only his ideological outlook but also his career opportunities and personal trajectory”; “his Brotherhood network would come into play at almost every key juncture of his life, and it would help him fundraise and recruit for the Afghan cause.” He had been “one of the very few Palestinians to study Islamic Law in the 1960s,” when secularism held the dominant position in Arab intellectual life. “Azzam’s sustained commitment to the weaker side in this political struggle is indicative of a deep and genuine ideological conviction,” a conviction refined by his mentor, a schoolteacher in his village who was a Brotherhood member. Later, the curriculum he found at the University of Damascus aimed not only “to transmit traditional religious heritage, but to train modern experts on Islamic law who could deal with real-world challenges,” such as the confrontation of the Shari’a with secular Common Law. “The Brotherhood presence at the Shar’ia faculty reflected the enormous importance that Islamists attached (and continue to attach) to the issue of legislation. The main political objective of all Brotherhood branches in the region was the Islamization of the legal system,” inasmuch as Muhammad himself was a legislator. Unfortunately for the Islamists, Syria’s nationalist/secularist Ba’thist Party seized power in 1963, strongly resisting the Brother’s agendum. Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser cracked down on the Brotherhood in that country; Nasser had the leading Brotherhood thinker, Sayyid Qutb, executed in 1966. Qutb had been Azzam’s principal intellectual influence, one whose writings he recommended to his students, after he became a university professor. [1]

Before that, however, Azzam joined in the guerrilla fighting along the Jordanian-Israeli border which erupted after the Six-Day War. The Fedayin conducted cross-border raids, recruiting militants from around the region. These men were mostly left-wing secularists, but some, like Azzam, were Muslim Brothers; “militarily insignificant” at the time, they would nonetheless form a nucleus of fighters among whom Azzam was already “a relatively senior figure,” although a military novice. With his training in the Shar’ia, he soon took “the role of a religious authority in the camps,” giving brief sermons before military engagements and also returning to talk about jihadi exploits among rank-and-file Arabs. Thus, by 1969 “Azzam was already taking on the role he would be famous for during the Afghan jihad, namely, as a preacher who brings news and martyrdom stories from the battlefront to the people.” From time to time, secularist-Islamist tensions within the Fedayin would flare; Azzam never wavered, reportedly sneering at the Left’s hero, Che Guevara, “My religion is Islam, and Guevara is under my foot.” Although the secular Arab regimes soon closed down the militants, who threatened their own rule more than Israel did, Azzam profited; his experience on the front line “gave him a taste of military life with all its emotional rewards: the sense of purpose, the thrill of adventure, the pride of making it through hardship, and the pleasure of camaraderie.” And it enhanced his prestige within the Brotherhood, which had prudently withdrawn from military struggle before the crackdown began.

He had already done some teaching in Saudi Arabia in the 1960s. He earned a Master’s degree in Islamic Law at the University of al-Azhar in Cairo, then a Ph.D, also at al-Azhar, “the most prestigious place of religious learning in the world of Sunni Islam” at that time.  In the early 1970s, Egypt’s new president, Anwar Sadat was less antagonistic towards Islamists than Nasser had been. For its part, the Egyptian chapter of the Brotherhood moderated its tone, “abandon[ing] revolutionary violence, in both theory and practice.” Azzam evidently held his tongue, completing his dissertation on Islamic jurisprudence in 1973, emerging from the university “as a classically trained scholar of Islamic Law with impeccable credentials.” On the strength of them he obtained a teaching position at the University of Jordan, where he taught for seven years. “As many as a third of the teaching staff in the department [of Shar’ia law] were Muslim Brothers, some of whom were known as relative hardliners.” A popular professor, Azzam advanced the ideology of Islamism not only on campus but in talks throughout Jordan. For a time, the monarchy there regarded the Islamists as useful counterweights to the leftists, who were sponsored by the Soviet Union, “confident that [Islamists] would not produce a violent revolutionary offshoot.”

That began to change. Having earned for himself the title, “Sayyid Qutb of Jordan,” he began to travel and lecture internationally, even visiting the United States in 1978, where he met Usama bin Laden at the University of Indiana’s Islamic Teaching Center. Back in Jordan, he began to teach a course titled “The Muslim World Today,” in which he propounded the claim that “Western and Jewish conspiracies against Muslims” were causing “most of the region’s ills.” Communism was nothing more than “a Jewish ploy to weaken Islam,” and indeed “all Communist revolutions in the world are Jewish” in their inspiration. The downfall of the Ottoman Empire, the last caliphate, was the product of exactly this Communist-Jewish conspiracy. Arab nationalist regimes constitute only another Communist front, deploying Arab Christians as their pawns. More alarming to the monarchy than these vaporings was his dismissal of the Jordanian regime as “un-Islamic” and secretly in alliance with Israel. His rhetorical fireworks against the neighboring Ba’athist regime’s struggle against the radical wing of the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria provoked “a Syrian hit team” to pepper his house with bullets in warning. Eventually, he was fired from his university position for threatening a Jordanian newspaper editor who had published a cartoon satirizing the Iranian mullahs, whom he preferred to the secularist Iraqi tyrant, Saddam Hussein on the grounds that at least the mullahs were Muslims. By then, even his Muslim Brotherhood colleagues had grown nervous about his outspoken radicalism, which threatened to upset the “delicate balance” between the Brothers and the monarchy.

He landed another university position, this time in Mecca. “Lacking educated manpower at this time,” Saudi Arabia welcomed foreign academics, including Brotherhood activists from Syria and Egypt. “These well-educated men found employment in Saudi schools and universities, and formed the backbone of the kingdom’s education system in the 1960s and 1970s.” At the same time, the movement for pan-Islamism was gaining momentum in the Middle East. Pan-Islamists differed from their predecessors because they dismissed the Arab governments as insufficiently Islamic, obstacles rather than vehicles for the restoration of the Caliphate. Whereas the Muslim Brotherhood had always advocated international cooperation among Muslims, “the various national Brotherhood branches had operated to a large extent as vertically separated silos, with most political activities taking place within countries”; now “there emerged a new class of Islamists, preoccupied with building horizontal connections between countries.” Activities included proselytizing on behalf of Islam and exploiting the annual Hajj in Mecca to network with fellow Islamists, while “construct[ing] an identity discourse emphasizing the unity of the Muslim nation and highlighting outside threats.” That is, before the Caliphate, a religio-national state, could be founded, it was first necessary to induce Muslims to think of themselves as ‘one nation under Allah,’ as it were, yearning for the honor and protection a Muslim state, indeed a Muslim empire, would bring. “Jihad is the key to Muslims’ success and felicity,” the pan-Islamists maintained, “especially when their sacred shrines [were] under the Zionist occupation in Palestine, when millions of Muslims are suffering suppression, oppression, injustices, torture and even facing death and extermination campaigns in Burma, Philippines, Patani, USSR, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cyprus, Afghanistan, etc.” Saudi Arabia and several other Arab governments “tolerated the diffusion of pan-Islamist propaganda because it vilified primarily non-Muslim powers” keeping the jihadis’ attention pointed ‘outward.’ 

In Mecca, Usama bin Laden may have attended some of Azzam’s lectures; at any rate, they reacquainted themselves with one another, more than a decade after their brief meeting in the United States. Bored with teaching, eager to return to the battlefield, Azzam taught only one semester at King Abd al-Aziz University, heading next to Pakistan, where he hoped to plan his move into his real destination, Afghanistan. Arriving in Islamabad in November 1981, he had an appointment at the Islamic University of Islamabad, which was part of Pakistani president Zia ul Haq’s policy of Islamization, undertaken against the secularist Bhutto family and its allies. Azzam joined a faculty with a large foreign Arab contingent, teaching students who were mostly foreigner from Asia or the Middle East. This Islam-based internationalism coincided with his own long-held convictions, and he took the opportunity to lead student trips to Afghan refugee camps in the Peshawar area. 

By the end of the 1980s, the Soviet military would kill somewhere between one million and two million Afghans while displacing about 7.5 million (“over half the population”). “Although the Afghan jihad was widely perceived in the West as a national liberation struggle, the Afghan Mujahidin neither presented nor saw themselves simply as a nationalist movement in need of external support.” They repeatedly proclaimed that they were engaged in a world-historical struggle, extending the Muslim revolution in Iran to its eastern neighbor, preliminary to greater conquests on behalf of Allah. For his part, Azzam worked to connect the Muslim Brotherhood to the Mujahidin, asking for humanitarian aid not fighters. The man who undertook military recruitment of Arabs was Jalaluddin Haqqani, who “became an important early ally of Azzam’s.” While he did bring the Afghan jihad to “Arab attention,” Azzam couldn’t unite the Mujahidin, nor could he persuade the Brothers to lend military support to them. Contrary to much that has been written, the Arabs who did fight in Afghanistan never received “direct support” from the CIA or any other Western intelligence services, which reserved their assistance for the indigenous fighters. (As for Bin Laden, he worked with the Saudis.) Generally, the Arab groups contributed little to the overall effort to expel the Soviets from the country. Azzam did arrange for Islamic charitable funding in Peshawar, through non-governmental organizations rather than governments: “No tyrant has power over me.” Such aid did assist the nascent terrorist movement, inasmuch as “it was in this period that Islamic charities developed the militant ties and problematic practices that led some of them to lend support, wittingly and unwittingly, to more radical organizations such as al-Qaida in the 1990s.”

Having failed to reconcile Mujahidin factions, Azzam turned to organizing the Services Bureau, “a militarized charity with projects in multiple domains.” Bin Laden provided the funding for its activities, which included hosting incoming volunteers, providing education for children and adults, gathering intelligence, monitoring press coverage of the war, coordinating humanitarian aid, military logistics, and publishing the Al-Jihad magazine, “a resounding success.” The Bureau itself was riddled with factions, which the “notoriously conflict-shy” Azzam failed to moderate; it nonetheless proved crucial to bringing Arabs to Afghanistan after the Soviets had been expelled. More, it functioned as “a vital mechanism for turning global Muslim interest in the Afghan jihad into actual fighters on the ground.” “Azzam was a better recruiter than manager,” bringing Muslims from “at least forty different countries” in “the most international volunteer force the world had ever seen.” It is noteworthy that “the Service Bureau’s most elaborate overseas infrastructure was not in the Middle East but in the United States”; Azzam himself visited dozens of American cities during the 1980s, telling Muslims there that they shouldn’t live in the West “because it exposed them to sinful things and benefited the Jews who run the global capitalist system.” The Bureau and other Islamist organizations recruited approximately 10,000 foreign fighters, half of them Arabs, most of them students. Although they didn’t do much to kill Russians, they did form a nucleus for worldwide terrorist activities after the Soviet troops retreated.

In addition to his lectures, in the 1980s Azzam published nine books and over 100 articles, arguing that “internal division was the main source of Muslim weakness”; “all forms of nationalism, sectarianism, ethnic politics, and tribalism” must be opposed. His theology was therefore syncretistic, intended as an ideational basis for activism in shared causes. “Azzam was thus in some sense an Islamic culture warrior; he considered it more important to protect Islamic culture from foreign influences than for Muslim society to advance materially or technologically.” “No education at all was better than a non-Islamic education,” he insisted. As in any regime, the Umma as Azzam conceived it held up an ideal human type for emulation, “a new conception of the ideal Muslim, a kind of homo jihadicus for whom warfare is integral to his way of life,” superior to any other form of religious activism. He claimed that jihadis witnessed many acts of divine intervention on the battlefield—for example, an enemy tank that exploded because an Islamic warrior threw a Koran under it—proof of Allah’s approval. Failure too only instanced divine approval, inasmuch as martyrs earn honor in Heaven. To those who doubted such tales, he replied that doubters are men of little faith. More worrisome were those Muslims who suspected Azzam of Sufism, on the grounds that claims of miracles and martyrdom smacked of mysticism. To this, he answered that the Koran itself testifies to the existence of miracles and lauds martyrdom.

The core of Azzam’s argument for jihadism “combined two existing but previously unconnected ideas”: that Islamic law requires Muslims to repel invaders of Muslim land by military force; and “that the duty of jihad is universal and not subject to approval by any one nation-state.” Individual Muslims must therefore heed the call to jihad in Afghanistan, regardless of the policy of their government. This doctrine had the advantage of shifting militants’ attention from “rebelling against Muslim rulers,” who might be false Muslims but claimed to be faithful, towards “fighting infidel invaders” who made no claims to be Muslims at all. Hegghammer notes that this nonetheless departs from Muslim orthodoxy, which holds that “jihad is in principle only an individual obligation for the population touched by the invasion,” whereas “for everyone else it is a collective obligation, meaning that it is optional and subject to a range of restrictions.” The only exception to this is a circumstance in which the Muslims under attack are unable to defend themselves; in that case, Muslims outside that area are obligated to intervene. This gave Azzam a theological opening. He argued that “the very existence of an occupation somewhere was evidence that the locals were unable to defend themselves, and hence the individual obligation should extend to all the world’s Muslims immediately.” This claim effectively ‘privatizes’ jihad, taking it out of the control of Islamic rulers. The problem was that jihadis so inspired might refuse the ruler of those who called them in. Having arrived in Afghanistan, many foreign fighters refused to obey Azzam’s commands, either, and factionalism arose within his own movement. 

Azzam called not only for military resistance to those who invade Muslim-ruled lands but terrorism, especially against Jews and against anyone who donated money to Israel. Answering a question after delivering a lecture in a California mosque, he endorsed “revenge on American Jews” as commanded by the Qur’anic verse, “Kill them wherever you find them.” 

In addition to expelling Soviet troops, the jihadis aimed at regime change, replacing the Soviet puppet government with the Taliban. Azzam hoped that “the Islamic state in Afghanistan would serve as a base for a new missionary effort and a military of other lost territories,” an “impregnable fortress,” as he called it, serving not only as a refuge for jihadis seeking shelter from persecutors but as the nucleus of “a transnational caliphate that would encompass all the world’s Sunni-majority nation-states,” an empire that might even expand worldwide, God willing. As the Mujahidin rolled back the Soviets, Azzam’s “hostility toward the West,” and toward America especially, intensified. He blamed the United States for assassinating Zia ul Haq and installing Benazir Bhutto in Pakistan and for planning to assassinate the leaders of the Afghan jihad. In response to such alleged enormities, he justified jihad defense of the Umma, which would in turn justify bin Laden’s terrorism. It was bin Laden who insisted that the Services Bureau expand its military activities, and so vindicate the honor of Arab volunteers. Being the Bureau’s principal donor, bin Laden got his way; in April 1987 he ordered an assault on an Afghan army outpost; Azzam fought alongside the other volunteers. Shortly thereafter, bin Laden formed al-Qaida in order to maintain order and discipline among his men. As yet, the organization “had no clear political objective or designated geographical operating area”; “it was not until the mid-1990s that the group would stake out a clear strategy in the form of war against America.” Meanwhile, although “the Arab role in evicting the Soviet Union” from Afghanistan “was miniscule,” the prestige of the new leaders had been enhanced throughout the jihadi network.

As with any regime, the “Afghan Arabs” had not only rulers and ruling institutions but a way of life. “The Afghan jihad experience was otherworldly compared with the ordinary lives most fighters left behind,” “involv[ing] extended isolation in landscapes that were literally moon-like as well as intense emotional and spiritual experiences” that induced many to abandon any thought of returning home. Azzam refined and directed these emotions with the careful use of poetry, “an age-old feature of mainstream Arab culture, which in the 1980s was used by Islamists to glorify jihad.” Azzam judiciously inserted poetic verses into his writings and speeches, drawing on what one co-worker called “an endless treasury of Arab epic poems” he had committed to memory, knowing “exactly how to use them in provoking the sentiments of Arab youths.” He also saw to it that “a specifically jihadi iconography” was developed for use in magazines and films. All of this established his authority as “the undisputed spiritual leader of the Afghan Arabs and an influential figure in intra-Mujahidin politics.” 

As Azzam gained prominence, he attracted enemies. These included the Pakistani government, nervous about too many Arab fighters on their soil, Salafists in Saudi Arabia, who distrusted his distrust in Arab governments and considered his theological syncretism too lax, jihadi radicals who judged him “too moderate,” Israel, which took exception to his ties with Hamas and his Pakistan-based training camps open to Palestinians, and finally rival Mujahidin factions. He was assassinated in 1989; any one of these entities may have done it. 

“Famous in life,” Azzam “became iconic in death.” Among jihadis, his memory is venerated to this day, by internationalists and even nationalists (especially Palestine’s Hamas). His main critics remain the more apolitical Muslims. His admirers continue to promote his legacy, keeping his books in print for the benefit of new recruits. The several, often conflicting, jihadi groups all claim him as their own, thanks to a certain vagueness in his writings which elevates him above the bitter tactical disputes that have given rise to faction. They “seem to have appreciated most of all…that he was a scholar who dared speak his mind and take part in jihad”—a figure combining the kind of spiritual and intellectual authority earnest youths revere with the kind of energy and ambition earnest youths possess, a man who synthesized words and deeds. As a result, “the phenomenon that Abdallah Azzam helped create has become the preeminent rebel movement of the post-Cold War era.

Note

1. For a brief account of Qutb’s religio-political thought, see “Islam and Modern Politics,” on this website under “Nations.”

Michael Pillsbury: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace American as the Global Superpower. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2015.

David P. Goldman: You Will Be Assimilated: China’s Plan to Sino-Form the World. New York: Bombardier Books, 2020. 

These authors seek to understand the Chinese regime as its rulers understand themselves, expressing themselves in the manner of peoples inured to tyranny—indirectly, with hints and allusions. In so doing, their books show how futile the Western strategy of ‘constructive engagement’ with that regime must be. 

Pillsbury writes with the ruefulness of a disillusioned man. A veteran intelligence officer, “I was among the first people to provide intelligence to the White House favoring an overture to China, in 1969,” believing 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.” He and his colleagues built this illusion on four false assumptions: that American engagement would meet with substantial cooperation from the Chinese rulers; that China’s villages already had “the seeds of democracy” implanted within them, and “local elections in Chinese cities and towns would eventually be followed by regional and national elections”; that China was a “fragile power,” in desperate need of assistance from the West; that China’s ‘hawks,’ the nationalist elements who openly sought victory over the West were weak, marginal figures whose influence would continue to wane. He now understands, however belatedly, that Chinese assurances that they “will never become a hegemon” because they don’t seek such a role have been lies. By the years immediately preceding the publication of his book, Pillsbury had listened as his Chinese interlocutors changed their tune, now saying “openly that the new order, or rejuvenation is coming, even faster than anticipated”; “in effect, they were telling me that they had deceived me and the American government”—the “most systematic, significant, and dangerous intelligence failure in American history.” 

When Chinese rulers deployed the phrase “the road to renewal,” they meant return to Chinese dominance. Pillsbury traces this to the nineteenth-century scholar and reformer Yan Fu, who translated Thomas Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics into Mandarin. In so doing, “Yan made a key error—translating the phrase natural selection as tao tai, or ‘elimination.'” That’s some error. As Yan glossed Huxley’s version of Darwinism, “the weak are devoured by the strong, and the stupid enslaved by the wise.” Mao’s neo-Marxism adopted merged these notions to class struggle but added, crucially, lessons derived from The General Mirror for the Aid of Government, an ancient account of “stratagems of the Warring States period in China” including “stories and maxims dating as far back as 4000 BC.” Although Pillsbury doesn’t quite see it, Mao was a Stalin with Chinese characteristics—suggested in a fact he does remark, that the Sino-Soviet relationship began to sour in 1953, almost immediately after Stalin’s death. 

As for the United States, “the Chinese planned to use the Americans as they had used the Soviets—as tools for their own advancement, all the while pledging cooperation against a third rival power.” A time-honored Chinese maxim states, “Kill with a borrowed sword,” or, “in other words, attack using the strength of another.” The strategy became explicit in 2009, when a People’s Liberation Army colonel named Liu Mingfu was allowed to publish The China Dream, a “nationwide best seller” which showed how China could succeed where the Soviet Union had failed, supplanting the United States in an ongoing “Hundred-Year Marathon” which had begun with the Chinese Communist revolution in 1949 and would end with a new world order, with China at its head, by 2049. “That new world is called tianxia, which in Mandarin can be translated as ‘under-heaven,’ ’empire,’ and ‘China'”—a telling conjunction.

By the “Warring States period,” Pillsbury means the five centuries between 771 BC and 221 BC, beginning with the defeat and death of the last king of the Zhou dynasty at the hands of warlords and foreigners. This long period ended only when “a new king, calling himself the first emperor, unified these Warring States” in 221. This was indeed “a brutal, Darwinian world of competition.” Centuries later, Western Sinologists and missionaries who entered China in the nineteenth century “were essentially led to accept a fabricated account of Chinese history,” one that “played up the Confucian, pacifist nature of Chinese culture and played down—and in many cases completely omitted any reference to—the bloody Warring States period.” This propagandistic whitewash in turn led observers of Mao to assume that he intended to uproot all “long-standing Chinese customs,” whereas in fact he intended primarily to uproot Confucianism, leaving the Legalist maxims seen in The General Mirror mostly intact, albeit with a novel, Marxist ‘spin.’

Pillsbury extracts nine principal lessons the Chinese communist regime derived from the Warring States period: first, never provoke a “powerful adversary” such as the United States “prematurely”; second, “manipulate your opponent’s advisers,” winning them over with blandishments, lies, and bribes; third, “be patient,” as “victory was sometimes achieved only after many decades of careful, calculated waiting”; fourth, “steal your opponent’s ideas and technology for strategic purposes”; fifth, “military might is not the critical factor for winning a long-term competition” since a weaker power can win by “targeting an enemy’s weak points and biding one’s time”; sixth, “recognize that the hegemon will take extreme, even reckless action to retain its dominant position,” once it wakes up; seventh, “never lose sight of shi,” meaning, deceive your enemies to act unwittingly for your benefit, “waiting for the point of maximum opportunity to strike”; eighth, “establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to the other potential challengers”; and ninth, “always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others.” In sum, as the ancient Chinese proverb has it, “On the outside, be benevolent; on the inside, be ruthless.” Consonant with these principles, “the decision to pursue an opening with the United States came not from China’s civilian leaders, but instead from a committee of four Chinese generals”—strategists of conquest, but conquest in the Chinese, not the Napoleonic, way.

While the practical advice derived from shi consists of indirection and patience, its core meaning is “the alignment of forces” or “propensity of things to happen,” circumstances “which only a skilled strategist can exploit to ensure victory over a superior force.” Until Americans figure that out, they will continue to lose ground to the Chinese oligarchy. Thus “Beijing found ways to encourage the U.S. intelligence community to help strength China, rather than sound the alarm” while “encourag[ing] American conservatives to see China as a partner against the Soviet Union, a fellow opponent of détente, and a nation that was not really even Communist.” Meanwhile, the Chinese have mastered the arts of calculation, using “quantitative measurement to determine how China compares with its geopolitical competitors, and how long it will be before China can overtake them,” emphasizing “the importance of economics, foreign investment, technological innovation, and the ownership of natural resources.” 

On the American side, Henry Kissinger now sees that the American ‘opening’ to China was possibly only because Chinese rulers were worried about Soviet aggression against China, supposing that the Americans were following a proverbial Chinese strategy of “sitting on top of the mountain to watch a fight between two tigers.” But that was what China should do, Mao decided—imitating Stalin’s nonagression pact with Hitler in 1939. There is a sobering point here that Pillsbury misses: Stalin did indeed triumph in that strategy, at enormous cost—a cost that the Soviet Union was able to pay, given its enormous population. China’s population is bigger still; it can afford to sacrifice millions of lives in the pursuit of it. Thus “China still called the United States its enemy,” a “useful tool for China, not a long-term ally.” Pillsbury calls this “a striking example of identifying and harnessing shi.”  Having just fought a battle with the Soviets in northwestern China, Mao needed a counterweight. Even as Mao signaled the Nixon administration that it sought a rapprochement (“Nixon did not first reach out to China,” it was the other way around), China was still considering “America the enemy and likened it to Hitler.” 

Mao’s astute deputy, Chou En-lai, told Kissinger’s translator, “America is the ba,” a term Englished as ‘leader.’ But in Mandarin, ba “has a specific historical meaning from the Warring States period, where the ba provided military order to the known world and used force to wipe out its rivals, until the ba itself was brought down by force. The ba is more accurately translated as ‘tyrant.'” If Kissinger had known that, “the Nixon administration might not have been so generous with China,” offering covert technological military assistance “based on the false assumption that it was building a permanent, cooperative relationship with Chia, rather than being united for only a few years by the flux of shi.

The sham not only continued but intensified under Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, who “became the public face for China’s PR offensive with the United States,” a man whose “tranquil, grandfatherly demeanor” made him “the kind of figure Westerners wanted to see” at the helm of China. Years later, a Chinese defector explained to U.S. intelligence officers that in the years immediately preceding the collapse of the Soviet empire, Deng had sided with hardliners in the Chinese Politburo, who pushed for “reviv[ing] Confucius as a national hero, after decades of Communist Party attacks on Confucian culture and anything hinting at religion more generally”—not (of course) out of any real sense of piety but as a spur to nationalism, to be accompanied by propaganda decrying China’s suffering at the hands of those wicked foreigners, the Japanese and the Americans. Pillsbury comments: “For the first time since Nixon’s opening in 1972, America had a genuine opportunity to shift its stance on China and to take a moment to see the Chinese leadership in a less than rosy light. Instead, the U.S. government worked as quickly as possible to return the U.S.-China relationship to a calmer plateau.” As President George H. W. Bush intoned, “I am convinced that the forces of democracy are going to overcome these unfortunate events in Tiananmen Square.” Needless to say, “his stance was bolstered by American business leaders eager to maintain their growing relationships and business opportunities” in China. Although the Clinton administration proved more skeptical, the Chinese went to work on the business-favoring elements within it, while “major donors to the Clinton campaign lobbied the president directly.” “By the end of 1993, in what the Chinese now refer to as ‘the Clinton coup,’ these allies persuaded the president to relax his anti-China stance.” Even translators at CIA headquarters were instructed not to translate hardline nationalist statements by Chinese officials, on the grounds that this would only provide fuel for American conservatives and left-wing human rights activists.

Pillsbury leaves no doubt that the Chinese understand their conflict with the United States as a geopolitical regime struggle. Although the Communist oligarchs had always considered the Americans as enemies in the long run, Deng’s turn to a more sharply anti-American line occurred in 1989 in reaction to two events: the pro-democracy rallies in Tiananmen Square and the American victory over the Soviet Union in the Cold War—events betokening, respectively, the prospect of regime change in China and a fundamental shift in the geopolitics of regime dominance in the world. The shi had shifted.

Central to the ensuing propaganda campaign within China—a campaign design to warn off all Chinese from esteem for the United States and its regime—was “the latest Chinese version” of American history. According to it, American villainies began early, with President John Tyler’s 1844 Treaty of Wangxia, opening the door to U.S. “illegal actions to exploit China,” efforts that have continued ever since. In the eyes of Chinese school textbooks, “the next American leader to make his mark was that supposedly anti-Chinese mastermind Abraham Lincoln,” who sent Anson Burlingame to negotiate a treaty ratified a few years after Lincoln’s murder, a treaty which “broke down native rituals and China’s system of etiquette”—namely, Chinese assumption that all foreign nations were to be treated as inferiors—in favor of ” Western diplomatic traditions”; this made possible Lincoln’s alleged “dream of American control of the Pacific.” A few decades later, during the Boxer Rebellion, America joined with seven other foreign powers to defeat “the patriotic rebels who were fighting to free China from Western dominance.” And so on. 

It is all rubbish. The Wangxia Treaty established Sino-American relations on equal terms, giving Chinese ports most-favored-nation status; the Burlingame Treaty “recognized Chinese sovereignty rights that had been threatened by European powers”; and “in the Boxer Rebellion, the United States was a leader in restraining the abuses of foreign soldiers.” And, of course, the United States attempted to vindicate Chinese sovereignty at Versailles and succeeded in doing so by defeating Japan in World War II. But since the Chinese take their maxims of international statecraft from lessons derived by Legalists from the Warring States period, and since those maxims include the supposition that equal relations among nations is a fiction or, alternatively, an outrage to Chinese honor, such facts will never gain any traction with the current regime of China, any more than they would have gained traction with any previous regime there.

As for tactics to be used against the United States internationally, these were outlined in the 1990s in Unrestrained Warfare, a book “released throughout China” at that time. “The authors”—People’s Liberation Army colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui—proposed “nonmilitary ways to defeat a stronger nation such as the United States through lawfare (that is using international laws, bodies, and courts to restrict America’s freedom of movement and policy choices), economic warfare, biological and chemical warfare, cyberattacks, and even terrorism.” Meanwhile, when dealing with the Americans directly, Chinese officials were all sweetness and light, suppressing information “about China’s absolute opposition to relinquishing its socialist economy” and “imply[ing] instead that China’s moderate reformers wanted to move to a free market and were likely to succeed in doing so.” Donations to ‘friendly’ Congress members were duly made. Some 350 Confucius Institutes, financed by the regime, were established on university campuses, worldwide. Offering courses on Mandarin and on Chinese history (judiciously selected), the Institutes likely serve as centers for espionage, surveillance of Chinese living abroad, and for undermining the image of Taiwan. Pillsbury identifies the main Communist Chinese influence-peddling strategies as direct and indirect pressure (the latter through proxies “including advertisers, satellite firms, and foreign governments.” The sticks include cyberattacks and physical assaults; the carrots include bribes and investments, the latter aimed particularly at the technology sector, which the regime carefully supervises in China while surveilling it elsewhere. 

In addition to the exercise of ‘soft’ power, China continues to strengthen its military capacities. Preferring not to alarm America and the other Western powers with a massive buildup of arms, “Chinese leaders are playing a long game, aiming to build up their deterrent capability quietly and to improve their conventional forces gradually,” an approach consistent with the Warring States precept of not provoking the hegemon “prematurely.” Their forces aim at the vulnerable points in the enemy’s armor—the metaphor is “the assassin’s mace”—and the maces include electromagnetic weapons deployed in space, lasers, and communications jamming. “As in the surprise intervention against U.S. and UN forces in Korea in 1950 and in surprise offensives against its neighbors India (in 1962) and the Soviet Union (in 1969), and Vietnam (in 1979), Chinese military leaders believe that the preemptive surprise attack can means the difference in determining the outcome of a military confrontation and can set the terms for a broader political debate (such as a territorial dispute).” The “Assassin’s Mace weapons” with which this military surprise attack would be launched “are far less expensive than the weapons they [would] destroy,” and would cause “confusion, shock, awe, and a feeling of being overwhelmed” in the minds of the enemy. Such tactics can be made especially effective if targets include U.S. computer systems and space satellites, the technological framework of American command, control, communications, and intelligence-gathering. 

Pillsbury rightly observes that reforms undertaken by the Chinese regime do not amount to a turn to capitalism. Indeed, “what has accelerated Chinese growth more than anything is not reform at all, but a commitment to subsidizing state owned enterprises” or “national champions,” which comprise about “40 percent of China’s GDP.” This isn’t Adam Smith; this isn’t ‘liberalism’; this is “a ruthless brand of mercantilism [which] traces back to China’s earliest days” but is readily adaptable to the principles and institutions of Leninism. Like Lenin in the 1920s, China in the post-Mao years has tapped into the world capitalist financial market via the World Trade Organization, which did not yet exist for Lenin to exploit. They gained WTO membership by “suppressing information about their mercantilist economic strategy,” running “a program of propaganda and espionage that was more sophisticated than anyone in the U.S. intelligence community suspected.” They did this in collusion with World Bank president A. W. Clausen, whose staff studied the Chinese economy and “made the politically sensitive decision to endorse China’s socialist approach and made no genuine effort to advocate for a true market economy”—a futile proposal at any rate, had they made it to the oligarchs. “By 1990 the largest World Bank staff mission was in Beijing.” After the Soviet Union collapsed, the future head of China’s central bank, Zhou Xiochuan, “rejected privatization and political reform,” since the Chinese people, having been stripped of much private property thanks to socialism, lacked the capital to invest in the state-owned enterprises up to the real value of those enterprises.

“In the Chinese SOE model, the Communist Party creates the SOE and defines its strategic purposes,” which (it should be needless to say) “advance the interests of the state,” interests secured by the appointment of SOE managers by the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. As any liberal economist would predict, while such government-subsidized industries foster inefficiency and corruption, they nonetheless “give Chinese corporations a huge competitive edge against the West,” from whom they assiduously buy or steal technologies and raw materials. Dreaming of some future ‘world government’ which they suppose they will run, World Bank and International Monetary Fund executives have ignored China’s violation of it commitment to open up the Chinese market to investors on equal terms, instead “acknowledg[ing] that the Chinese regulations requir[ing] the SOEs tp safeguard the interests of the Chinese government” remain in place. Remarkably, the World Bank also encouraged China to establish portfolio holding companies similar to mutual funds along with stock exchanges, but all within the framework of state socialism. “This arrangement was euphemistically termed partial privatization.”

“Without Western help, the SOEs would have languished and would eventually been outcompeted by China’s private entrepreneurs. The SOEs nonetheless thrive because Westerners have saved them.” Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley operatives showed them “how to comply with international financial and accounting requirements” without disturbing the activities of China’s National Development and Reform Commission, which sets “state policy for strategic industries and approves major investments” and “appears to be the nerve center of Chinese economic strategy.” Despite their seeming compliance with international rules, “there’s one thing China’s competitors can count on: China won’t play by the rules.” “To evade detection, [the Chinese] use rapidly evolving tools such as malicious software, cybertool sharing, hacker proxies, routing of cyberoperations through third or fourth countries, and more.” 

Given its ambition to replace the American version of a ‘New World Order’ and to take over the international corporatists’ version of that, what will the 2049 ‘Chinese World Order’ look like? Pillsbury remarks the underlying principle: “For China, personal rights in the American sense do not exist.” When, in the 1860s, an American missionary translated an international law text into Chinese, he saw that “the Chinese language did not have a term for rights.” He invented the term chuan li, combining the Chinese words for “power” and “benefits.” But this hardly conveys the underpinning of the law of nations, which had been the law of nature until 19th-century historicist philosophers rejected natural law for the supposed laws of historical evolution, ‘laws’ that do indeed combine power with benefits. This state-centered rather than human-centered version of international law gives free play to Chinese self-aggrandizement under the cover of international law in principle. In practice, it gives free play to the Chinese regime’s intention not only to control the Internet within China but to impose “global censorship by the year 2050,” extending its rule over “not only what its citizens”—one might suggest ‘subjects’ as the more accurate term—are allowed to see, “but also what many other nations’ citizens see.”

No wonder “Chinese officials prefer a world with more autocracies and fewer democracies.” They are engaged in a global regime struggle; unlike many of their enemies, they know they are. “As China’s power continues to grow, its ability to protect dictatorial, pro-China governments and to undermine representative governments will likely grow dramatically as well.” Pillsbury sees that “Beijing has officially and repeatedly endorsed President Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe,” but he doesn’t see that Mugabe isn’t merely a dictator and a ‘friend of China’ but a Maoist. [1] Beijing has also supported Omar al-Bashir of Sudan, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, and Saddam Hussein, while taking care to suppress its native Muslims, the Uighurs. In its near abroad it has founded what the rulers explicitly understand as “a potential counter to NATO”: the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, consisting of China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan—a “coalition of autocracies” against NATO’s “alliance of twenty-eight democracies.” They fuel this geopolitical struggle by ignoring international warnings against industrial pollution, which is “unprecedented” due to the sheer size of the Chinese economy. And given the character of its regime, “China lacks a robust and productive civil society that represents the interests of the people exposed to carcinogens and the other poisons produced by China’s rapid development.”

According to the principles derived from the Warring States period, “a rising challenger must delegitimize” the authority of the existing “hegemon” in order to replace it. The world order, such as it is, now defended by the United States, will be replaced with a “Sinocentric world” of oligarchies and tyrannies. To get there, China faces “a major test”: Japan’s response “to the growing aggressiveness” of China in the waters between them. “To demonize Japan, China has sent the message that it regards Japan’s wealth, and its position as America’s main ally in Asia, as products of ill-gotten gains from World War II.” Another obvious test will come in Taiwan, whose “business elite” has received blandishments from the Mainland; acting in the way characteristic of internationalist naïfs, many of Taiwanese corporate bosses “have become strong advocates of cross-strait rapprochement.” A combination of such carrots, along with the stick of Communist China’s military buildup, will cause Taiwan to fall into Mainland hands like ripe fruit—or so the Communists expect.

What should the United States government do to counter the Chinese strategy? Pillsbury offers a twelve-step program. First, recognize the problem; second, require from all federal agencies and departments annual reports on aid programs to China; third, measure America’s competitiveness with China by require an annual report of “trends and forecasts about how the United States is faring relative to its chief rivals”; fourth, develop a multi-agency program “to enhance American competitiveness,” especially with regard to technological innovation; fifth, bring together the various groups within the United States that do perceive China as a substantial, in-principle threat to the American regime, whether they are human rights activists or business corporations concerned with the theft of intellectual property; sixth, build an international coalition of countries also perceive the Chinese regime as a threat, aiming at the containment/encirclement of China diplomatically and militarily.

Pillsbury recommends, seventh, that Americans stand up for political and religious dissidents in China, who include the tens of millions of Chinese Christians; eighth, the federal government should work with corporations to oppose China’s anti-American anti-competitive conduct, notably its cyber spying; ninth, the United States and Europe, in their mission to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, should identify and shame the country that is “increasing its own [greenhouse gas emissions] by more than five hundred million tons annually”; tenth, the United States and American media should expose corruption and censorship in China, the “Chinese leaders’ corruption, brutality, and history of lying about the United States and our democratic allies’: eleventh, the United States should support China’s pro-democracy and pro-free-market reformers to a much greater degree than it has done; finally, it should monitor and influence the internal debates between ‘hawks’ and ‘reformers’ within the Chinese government itself, even as the Chinese monitors those in the United States it regards as “supporters of Beijing and those who are skeptics, those who can be manipulated and those who have caught on to the Marathon strategy.” While Americans should not overestimate Chinese military and financial capacities, they should work much harder to understand what they are and where they are trending. Finally, and now speaking as a veteran operative within the U.S. intelligence ‘community,’ Pillsbury wants “the American public” to understand “the extent of the covert cooperation between Washington and Beijing over the past forty years,” the better to understand the mistakes made during the “Marathon” most Americans didn’t know they were running.

In his analysis of the Chinese regime, David P. Goldman discounts Marxism-Leninism altogether, claiming that although “China’s regime is cruel,” it is “no crueler than the Qin dynasty that buried a million conscript laborers in the Great Wall.” (At the risk of drawing a distinction without a sufficient difference, one should notice that Mao buried tens of millions not to build the equivalent of the Great Wall but in an absurd attempt to remake human nature in China.) At any rate, Pillsbury would surely agree that “China is turning outward and looking hungrily at the world. And we look like a protein source.” 

To consume, digest, and assimilate the West, China does more than steal and counterfeit technology. It has developed its own technological elite, often trained at American and other Western universities, “driv[ing] fundamental research and development through the aggressive pursuit of superior weapons systems, and let[ting] the spinoffs trickle down to the civilian economy,” just as the West has done with atomic power and computing. Meanwhile, America has shrunk its investment in basic research and science; today, “just 5 percent of our college students major in engineering compared to one-third in China.” “China now graduates more scientists and engineers than the United States, Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea combined, and six times as many as the United States alone”; in the past decade, “the quality of Chinese scientific education has risen to world standards,” thanks to the American graduate schools which have trained them. 

Chinese elites have always been ambitious, but for millennia they have turned their ambitions against one another, as natural constraints (drought and floods, famine and pestilence) have kept them where they are. “No more; China can feed itself and control natural disasters. It has turned outward to the world and is seeking its place in the sun. This is a grand turning point in world history.” Politically and economically, it has rejected Western commercial republicanism, “remain[ing] authoritarian” while “deepen[ing] its economic success.” There will be no ‘revolution from below’ in China, accustomed as the Chinese are to being “ruled by an imperial caste of administrators selected by standardized exams”; “the Communist Party is simply another incarnation of the Mandarin caste.” The oligarchy/aristocracy of China, past and present, rules a vast, polyglot country by learning a language that is universal not in speech (only ten percent of Chinese speak Mandarin) but in writing. “Chinese children learn the characters, the ideograms that unite China into a single culture, in a marathon of acculturation that is unlike anything Wester children undertake, with the possible exception of traditional Jewish religious education.” Conquered peoples were “invited to become Chinese” through the medium of writing, and the culture of education resulting from this lent itself to the famous system of civil service examinations by which the ruling bureaucrats were selected. This regime channels ambition through the tests, through learning, when its rulers do not fall into fighting amongst themselves. “China is not a nation state, but rather an imperial structure composed of highly diverse peoples and tongues, always subject to centrifugal pressures which in time of crisis have led to the division of the empire at frightful human cost.”

Unlike the Japanese, who revere their emperor, the Chinese rather dislike theirs and “certainly do not want to die for him.” The emperor’s function is to provide “individual Chinese [with] a platform for the achievement of individual ambition.” On such occasions as the emperor has lost “the capacity to satisfy the ambitions of [his] most demanding subjects”—losing “the Mandate of Heaven,” as the saying once went—the men of frustrated ambition “routinely allied with foreign invaders against the imperial throne.” But under normal conditions, the ‘Mandarins’ or Mandarin-mastering bureaucrats served as the emperor’s instruments in “a ruthless meritocracy.” In China, the ruling institutions haven’t been designed so that ambition counteracts ambition, as in America, because securing liberty (or any other natural right) is not the purpose of the regime. Whereas America and the West generally derives much of its energy from the civil associations described by Tocqueville, the Chinese regime derives and directs Chinese energies through a sort of aristocracy formed by rigorous education, then “assigns them to supervise every social function.” Civic self-government means nothing. Chinese are, however, loyal to their families, which is why the emperor traditionally styled himself as the father of all Chinese, the father of all fathers. “China understands loyalty to superiors and benevolence towards inferiors, but not the rights and obligations that define the relationship of citizen and state in the West.” “The will of the pater familias, or his avatar the emperor, has no constraints except those of filial charity.” 

Consistent with this aristocratic regime and imperial state, China’s “foundational myth” of a great flood differs sharply from the account of the Biblical flood. Both events are likely based on fact. But Noah’s flood was an act of divine punishment, the destruction of almost all of the human race in rebuke of its “violence and cruelty.” In the Bible, this “leads to the establishment of a moral order by the righteous survivor,” to the establishment of the Noachide commandments for all human beings. In contrast, “China’s great flood arises from an accident of nature rather than an act of divine retribution, and it leads to the founding of Chinese civilization in the form of Xia Dynasty,” which then figured out how to manage floods by “the combined labor of the entire population.” “Not divine mercy, but human intervention” and (one might add) not the promulgation of universal, divinely-ordained laws for all humanity but a new regime for the Chinese, saves China. Thousands suffered and died to construct this system of dikes and dams: “Then as now, the Chinese accepted hardship and even cruelty on behalf of collective need” and their rulers formulated a long-term strategy to meet that need. Some of the most spectacular engineering feats were rewarded by the deification of the men who designed them. “China is the only civilization to make civil engineers into gods.” And the resulting infrastructure buttressed state centralization, again in sharp contrast to ancient Israel, where “small farmers worked their own land, and the prophetic ideal called for every man to sit under his own vine and fig tree,” enjoying his own property, an image George Washington repeatedly invoked in the commercial republican regime founded upon the natural right to (among other things) private property. 

Goldman elaborates on the distinction between Judaism, as one pillar of Western civilization, including Western economics and politics, and China. The humanism of Judaism is humane because the God worshipped by the Jews is holy—separate from His people and from humanity as such. This enables him to enter “into a covenant of mutual obligations with humans,” an act by which He, and they, found a relationship on emunah or faith, “meaning loyalty as well as belief,” conceiving “something to be true” and also that we “must be steadfast in acting according to that truth.” The “Jewish genius” for commerce comes from that sense of the centrality of faith or credit. “The investors in a bond or stock issue are not linked by ties of family or personal loyalty,” as in China, “but rather by contract, law, and custom”—obligations that “extend beyond the ancient loyalties of family and clan.” Where “faith is absent” capital markets don’t exist because “the public does not trust the government to enforce contracts, or the management of a company not to steal money,” a condition “emphatically true in China.” “Adam Smith’s invisible hand isn’t enough. Capital markets require more than the interaction of self-interested individuals; they require a common sense of the sanctity of covenant, of mutual obligations between government and people, and between one individual and the next. That is why the United States of America is the most successful nation in economic history,” having carried over these ‘Old Testament’ principles on the Mayflower, and having solemnized them throughout the nation with the United States Constitution, the greatest of all political contracts, and one which made the entire country a ‘free-trade zone.’ 

As things actually happened in China, however, the triumph of a centralized, imperial state ruled by an emperor and his subservient aristocracy of bureaucrats gained its authority from its control of nature, including human nature, losing it when it loses that control. Hence the well-known cycles of Chinese history, first registered in the West in the translation and adaptation of the Confucian scholar Zhu Xi’s Annals by the eighteenth-century Jesuit missionary Joseph-Anne-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla. [2] The rivers of China flood; its earth quakes; its weather shifts violently. Moreover, it has little arable land—only ten percent of the total, as contrasted with twenty-five percent in Europe. China is huge but naturally fragile. “The recurrent phenomenon of famine and its secondary consequences, civil war, foreign invasion and plague, has destroyed the work of past dynasties and forced China to retrace its steps dozens of times in its history”; “again and again in Chinese history, the fruits of Chinese diligence, inventiveness, and ambition were destroyed by natural and political disaster.” But if the dynasties passed, the civilization remained, “demonstrat[ing] endurance equaled by no other in history.” With the discovery of modern scientific technique in the West, and its importation to China, the Chinese rulers finally have an instrument to maintain themselves in a position of authority, an instrument consistent with, if never generated by, Chinese civilization, which includes political monarchism and aristocratism. “With nothing to fear from famine or foreign invasion, the Chinese have no natural obstacles to their ambition,” which in its turn bides no moral restraints to its scope beyond loyalty to superiors. 

“The unifying capacity of Chinese civilization has never had such a decisive advantage” against centrifugal forces as it now enjoys. This frees the regime to design and to implement “a plan to assimilate most of the world’s population into a virtual empire dominated by its telecommunications, computation, manufacturing, and logistics.” And the regime is now free to do so openly; the mask is off. In this, they deploy the mindset not so much of human ‘intel,’ with its secrecy and subterfuge, the world Pillsbury has lived in and invokes, but the mindset that prevails in the domain of artificial intelligence, which the regime has cultivated. “In a digital world,” Goldman explains, “there are binary outcomes. Either you’re Facebook,” the winner, “or Myspace,” the loser, either Google or Altavista. “Networks’ effects dictate that there will be only one winner in each field of digital technology.” The Chinese regime guarantees that China will win its “binary” or dialectical conflict with the West by shielding its technology firms, and indeed its Internet, from Western competitors while making its firms so strong that the rest of the world will need to cooperate with them. While American technology firms seek to appeal to ‘consumers,’ to increase profits, “the Chinese want to transform the way we live”—the way of life being one crucial aspect of any regime. The Chinese pursue not merely wealth but a strategy of regime change through the technologies of the mind, through the ‘artificial’ intelligence of man-made quantum computing technology.

As for the regime’s rule of the Chinese themselves, not to worry. “The Ministry of State Security knows where everyone is at all times and whom they are with”; they monitor human behavior right down to the expressions that flicker across the faces of their subjects. Goldman states the obvious: “This technology gives China unprecedented tools for social control,” including the power both to “suppress the coronavirus epidemic” and to suppress any regime-threatening epidemic of social and political dissent. This means that Chinese modernization has not been, and need not be “the enclave of a middle-class modernity, as in India,” or in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, an engine of social, political, and economic liberalization, “but a movement that reaches into the capillaries of society” to an extent that M. Foucault could not imagine. 

In turning outward from this secure foundation, China intends “to export its model to Southeast Asia, Central Asia, Latin America, and parts of the Middle East and Africa,” offering to lift those populations out of poverty while “giv[ing] dictatorial regimes previously unimagined tools for social control.” Whereas the newer generations of Chinese and Western societies alike have stagnated, China acts “aggressively to position itself as the dominant equipment supplier, investor, joint venture partner, and technology provider for the regions in which the next generation of young workers is growing. In doing so, they will render these countries dependent upon them. “The most productive countries of the Global South will be hardwired into the Chinese economy.” Meanwhile, with its huge investment “to connect the Eurasian continent through a network of railroads, broadband, energy pipelines, and ports through the overland Silk Road Economic Belt and the Maritime Silk Road,” China aims at “bring[ing] all of Eurasia into its economic sphere”—Mackinder’s “World Island”—in “the grandest imperial project in human history.” Goldman points to the potential but also to the pitfalls. This “virtual empire” relies on “less-than-stable, and often less-than-honest, governments to see infrastructure projects through.” Pakistan has been “the largest single destination for Belt and Road investment.” It has also “become an economic quagmire for Beijing.” The answer to the dilemma seems to be to keep the Pakistani army well-greased with riches and to keep the Paks generally illiterate and poor, therefore subservient to the army that cooperates with the Chinese. Besides, “China can get away with a lot of mistakes, because the United States and its allies offer no real competition,” offering comparatively “miniscule” infrastructure investments in these countries. 

In the field of technology, the United States is losing that competition, too. Most microchips used in the United States are not manufactured there, and the components of the microchips manufactured by such foreign companies as Ericsson and Nokia are made in China. Merely banning products made by Huawei won’t do, because “if China’s Ministry of State Security wants to hide ‘backdoors’ in components, it can hide them under an Ericsson or Nokia label just as easily as under a Huawei label,” enabling the Chinese to “sabotage the system” in which the chips are embedded, when and as desired. China itself became self-sufficient in computer chip technology in 2018 and in general “China is no longer an export-dependent economy.” 

Turning from economic war to the military dimension of the conflict, Goldman observes that the United States and China deter one another from military attack, and each side could blind the other’s satellites, deranging naval capacities—although China would retain the capacity to defend its coastline with its observation systems there. “As matters stand, the United States couldn’t fight a war with China if it wanted to,” as “its forces in the region would be devastated by Chinese missiles in the first hours of combat, along with its communications and surveillance capability.” According to him, and in explicit contradiction to Pillsbury, there is consequently little likelihood of war between the two countries, each having too much to lose. “There is no arcane Oriental secret plan, no Fu Manchu pulling strings behind the scenes to subvert the West, no recondite Communist conspiracy. There is nothing but the fact that China copied the best of American practice and put vast government resources into advanced military technology with the objective of denying the United States military access to its coastlines.” Assuming that this is so, Pillsbury might well reply: ‘That is true for today. But what will be the next step?”

Consistent with his predominantly political-economic analysis of the struggle, Goldman limits his recommendations for U.S. statesmen to two: the restoration of America’s industrial base and public support for research and development. America should have urged one of its computer companies buy one of the major foreign computer chip manufacturers; the impediment to this is that American firms are out to make a profit, not to serve the country’s national security interests. As for R & D, Goldman reminds his readers that “the entirety of the digital age” came out of military research and investment, as did much of the research on lasers. The American government should reinvigorate its funding for such research. Thus, although he doesn’t want military research so much for military purposes, Goldman does want it for the advance of technological innovation generally; he comes to much of what Pillsbury wants by a less direct route. “We cannot afford to source chips, displays, and other sensitive defense electronics from overseas”; to stop that “will require direct subsidies,” which “are justifiable on national security as well as economic grounds.” This is what Americans did, successfully, during the Cold War. 

To the military ‘demand side’ of this equation Goldman adds a ‘supply side’ element, namely, tax incentives for American exports, tax disincentives for imports, but more (given the emergency) a requirement that all “sensitive defense-related good” be made in the U.S. “In other words, for certain important categories of security-related manufactures, the tariff should be infinite.” He warns against “conventional industrial policy” much preferring the use of government funds “to seed new companies that can develop innovative technologies,” since venture capitalists have already decided that American industry cannot “stand up to Asian competition.” “The greatest lesson we can draw from the Kennedy space program and the Reagan Strategic Defense Initiative is that the most productive investments are the ones that test the frontiers of physics. These projects enabled us to fight the next war, not the previous one.” The American regime of commercial republicanism still has one “decisive advantage” over its enemies: “America’s genius for innovation.” 

Taken together, these books show how, and to some extent why, the regime of the Chinese Communist Party has targeted the West, and the United States in particular, in a geopolitical struggle that the United States may or may not win, or survive.

Notes

1. For a clear identification of Mugabe as a Maoist, at the time he took charge of Zimbabwe, see Will Morrisey: “Rhodesia: Emotions and Realities,” on this website, under “Nations.”
2. Joseph-Ann-Marie de Moyriac de Mailla: Histoire générale de la Chine, ou Annales de cet Empire (Paris: Clousier, 1777-1784).