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).

Orville Schell and John De Lury: Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the Twenty-First Century.  New York: Random House, 2013.

 

Wisely “emphasizing the perspectives of the Chinese themselves,” the authors trace the actions of a succession of Chinese regimes as they undertook “the abiding quest for fuqiang, ‘wealth and power.'” Rather optimistically, they tell us that the recent success of these effects have “made Chinese society finally more ready than ever for the possibility of a more open and democratic future,” even while admitting that the adage fuguo qiangbing means “enrich the state and strengthen its military power,” a sentiment deriving not from Confucianism but from the hard-headed doctrines of Chinese Legalism—hardly a prolegomena for democratization. Indeed, “what “Liberté, egalité, fraternité meant to the French revolutionaries and to the making of the modern West, ‘wealth, strength, and honor’ have meant to the forging of modern China…. Reformers have been interested in democratic governance at various stages of China’s tortuous path, not so much because it might enshrine sacred, unalienable political liberties but because it might make their nation more dynamic and strong.” Chinese ruler have experimented with democratization but also with “communism, fascism, and authoritarianism” in search of “a formula that worked.”

The 1842 Treaty of Nanjing ended the Opium War, stipulating that China no longer controlled its political and military policies. The Chinese Communist Party regime describes this treaty as a major cause of Chinese poverty and weakness, which the Party inherited after seizing power slightly more than a century later. There must have been prior causes enabling the Western powers to defeat China in the first place, however, and these were identified by Wei Yuan, a classically trained scholar/official whose generation had superintended the catastrophe. Wei called for the Chinese to understand the modern science which provided the intellectual framework within which Western navies had “wreaked havoc along Chinese coasts and up her riverways, into the heart of the empire.”

Only half a century earlier, the Qing Dynasty was at its apex. When England’s George III sent an embassy requesting a trade treaty, the emperor dismissed the overture, indicating that China had “no great need for England’s goods or inventions, and, in any event, it was not accustomed to establish ‘equal’ relations with anyone”; after all, “We possess all things,” he explained, and therefore “have no use for your country’s manufactures.” The authors consider the Emperor’s judgment to have been “a perfectly rational assessment of the balance of power between China and the West at that moment.” The head of the British contingent nonetheless suspected that that moment was fleeting; he compared the Chinese empire to “an old, crazy, first-rate Man-of-War,” imposing in its day but rotting underneath. Once she wrecks, “she can never be rebuilt on the old foundation.” There were already rebellions in the distant provinces, a telling sign of centralized authority on the wane.

By Wei’s time, the Englishman’s prediction had materialized. Wei was well prepared to notice. His teacher was the pretended Confucian thinker Liu Fenglu, who had “inducted his bright acolyte into an esoteric school of Confucianism that claimed to unlock secret teachings of the Sage through unorthodox readings of classical texts.” Liu claimed that Confucius didn’t really consider the course of events to be cyclical, with imperial dynasties rising and falling; rather, things “progressed in a linear, teleological fashion, from an ancient era of Chaos toward a utopian future called datong, ‘Grand Harmony.'” To hasten the arrival of this consummation, Confucius supposedly taught “a secret set of pragmatic, realpolitik methods to keep the world orderly until the era of Grand Harmony arrived.” To anyone familiar with Chinese thought, this is obviously a Legalist subversion of Confucianism, an attempt to put a Confucian mask on Legalist doctrine. It is a rhetorical strategy employed by the rulers of China to this day.

For his part, Wei advanced the Legalist cause by publishing An Anthology of Statecraft Writings from the Present Dynasty in 1826. The term for ‘statecraft’ is jingshi, “ordering the world”; Chinese Legalists posing as Confucians deployed it to indicate their departure from traditional Confucians “who were more interested in ethical self-cultivation, metaphysical philosophy or classicist scholasticism.” As the authors remark, “Wei’s statecraft reform agenda turned out to be based less on the moral values preached by Confucians than on the precepts of the Sage’s ancient rivals,” bringing “these very un-Confucian ideas back into the mainstream of nineteenth-century reform thinking,” even while insisting (quite correctly) that Confucius and his followers did have a political teaching. Indeed, Confucians and Legalists alike would have endorsed the attempt to prevent the British imperialists from selling Indian opium to the Chinese—a policy intended to pacify the nation, weaken resistance to foreign encroachments, and to deplete China financially—even as the Chinese Communists are doing today in the United States, in collaboration with Mexican drug cartels, and for the same purposes. The British policy succeeded; they won the Opium War and obtained Hong Kong as a prize of empire along with access to four coastal cities for purposes of trade. Wei concluded that the Chinese had better learn a lot more about Western technology, geopolitics, and the synergy between the two.

In his next book, Records of the Conquest, he “argued that Chinese needed to feel a more acute sense of humiliation over their current fallen status,” the better to spur them to fighting back. “Humiliation stimulates effort; when the country is humiliated, its spirit will be aroused.” Subsequent Chinese political and intellectual figures have taken this teaching very much to heart, repeating the lessons of China’s ‘Century of Humiliation’ at the hands of the West, with the United States now replacing Great Britain as the prime humiliator. Subsequent Wei productions included a proto-Mahanian analysis of maritime power and a discussion of how that power now linked the major continents in a way unseen in previous centuries. No Chinese had understood this before; no Chinese had felt the need to try. As Wei wrote of the British, for them “soldiers and trade are mutually dependent. By overpowering [their rivals], they have become the most powerful of the island barbarians.” Wei didn’t advocate a counter-imperialism—only a sufficiency of “barbarian techniques” for Chinese self-defense. He admired the United States for having adapted exactly that stance, beginning with the Washington administration, and also for having established a democratic civil society, a system that “may truly be called public.” Having seen the impotence of the Chinese monarchic and bureaucratic regime, he advocated not a republican regime, however, but a strong, more centralized modern state—effectively an oligarchy—on a democratic social basis.

The Qinq Dynasty tottered on, nearly overthrown by the Taiping Rebellion of the 1850s and again humiliated in the Second Opium War of 1856-60, which resulted in the destruction of its royal garden and summer palaces. This new humiliation strengthened the desire for revenge among China’s elites, and it remains a useful foil for Communist Party propaganda to this day. Wei’s successor in the next generation of Chinese scholar/officials was Feng Guifen, who took Wei’s call for zixiu ziqiang or “self-improvement and self-strengthening” into the second half of the nineteenth century, “articulating core principles for what was China’s first indigenous plan for modernization.” Given the fact that China is far bigger than any of the Western countries, Feng asked, “Why is it that they are small and strong, yet we are big and weak?” The answer could be found in Western superiority in education, economic development, political legitimacy, and intellectual inquiry. “Chinese would have to swallow their pride and become more like their adversary in these fundamental areas.” Learn from the West but accept no aid from them, particularly the military aid which entailed the presence of foreign troops on Chinese soil. Hire a small cadre of Western military specialists to train Chinese, who would then replace their tutors. Again following Wei, Feng advocated the use of national humiliation as a goad toward the recovery of national honor. He pointed to Japan, which had already begun to build modern ships, as proof that Asian nations could indeed strengthen themselves by learning from the barbarians. 

Also like Wei, Feng expressed a measured appreciation for American democracy if not for American republicanism. Considering the recent election of Abraham Lincoln, “The president rules the nation,” he imagined, and his “political power is transmitted not to [his] son but to the wise.” “Thereby” (Feng continued) “the nation became wealthy and powerful, gradually surpassing in national strength even Russia, England and France. Who dares say that there is no man [of greatness] among the barbarians?” With Tocqueville, he admired American “village democracy.” He stopped short of republicanism for the nation as a whole, preferring what the authors call a regime of “participatory authoritarianism” whereby the authority of the emperor would win popular consent by means of providing the people with social welfare and education, as seen in northern Europe. Above all, and again like Wei, he praised Western modernity: “If a system is no good, even though it is from antiquity, we should reject it; if a system is good, then we should follow it, even if it originates from uncivilized peoples.” For their part, Confucians dismissed all of this as typical Legalist scheming. Nonetheless, in 1898 the emperor read Feng’s essays and had them “distributed to his entire senior bureaucracy, who were ordered to suggest which parts of his proposals should be implemented.” The effort proved too little, too late.

This brings the authors to the career of Feng’s younger contemporary, the Empress Dowager Cixi, whom they rescue from slanders fabricated by a British sinologist named Edmund Backhouse, whose tales of orgies at the imperial palace were, as the joke goes, much exaggerated. Cixi’s real failing was her inability to modernize China so as to compete successfully not so much with the West as with Japan and semi-Western Russia. 

She ruled China from 1861, when her husband the emperor Xianfeng died at the age of thirty, leaving her as regent, until her death in 1908, having survived her son and a nephew she placed on the throne after the young man’s death. Although she supported provincial reforms, she failed “to broaden and intensify these scattered and localized reform efforts into a comprehensive, empire-wide initiative.” She adopted the Liu-Wei-Feng “discourse of humiliation and self-strengthening” while doing less than enough to get results, as many of the modernizers, less than impressed with her abilities, rightly and disappointedly anticipated. In 1884 she went to war with the French over control of Indochina and lost. In 1894 she went to war with the Japanese (“the dwarf people,” as Chinese had long called them) over control of Korea and Taiwan and lost. Unlike China, Japan had effectually adopted the Chinese neo-Legalists’ notions about state-building wedded to token democratization under the slogan, “Rich country, strong army.” 

When the “sickly” but “audacious” nephew, the emperor Guangxu, having read Feng’s principal book, attempted to reform the Chinese state, the Dowager initially said nothing but soon sided with the resistant bureaucracy. She had Guangxu arrested. At the same time, somewhat improbably, a consortium of martial arts groups in northern China developed a resentment of Chinese Christian converts amongst them, of the foreign missionaries who had worked with them, and of the foreign emissaries who supported and protected both. The rebellion of the “Boxers,” as Westerners called them, risked provoking another foreign intervention in China while at the same time threatening the monarchy itself, if it moved to shield the foreigners. “Cixi fatefully decided to back the Boxers” in what the authors call “a moment of delusional revanchism.” When the Boxers laid siege to the foreign embassies in Beijing, and eight-nation military force broke the siege and forced Cixi to flee her capital.

Surviving, she eventually charmed her way back into the good graces of the foreigners, who had no capacity or desire actually to rule such a vast empire.  She then proceeded to offend and enrage the Confucian bureaucrats and aspiring bureaucrats by abolishing the civil service examination system, intending to replace traditional learning with what one indignant traditionalist called “barbarian learning.” The traditionalists had the advantage of coming for the most part from the majority of ethnic Han Chinese, whereas the ruling dynasty were Manchus. Modernization could be pilloried as a scheme to enrich the Manchus and to subordinate the Han.

Such unrest in the end did not redound to the benefit of Confucianism, however. The new generation of Chinese included the writer Liang Qichao, whom the authors call “the most influential thinker of early twentieth-century China.” Liang was “the first public figure to argue that China’s revival would require the wholesale destruction of the cultural tradition that he had come to view as holding back his country’s progress, and the creation of a whole new sense of national self in its place,” a sense epitomized in the title of his journal, New Citizen. He called for an open break from Confucianism and the imperial regime; himself taught by a ‘Confucian’ Legalist in the Liu line, Liang pursued a career in journalism, always staying a step ahead of local authorities, always influencing the increasingly powerful engine of public opinion in a society that was democratizing underneath a regime still dependent upon the aristocratic and semi-feudal institutions which had set the tone for the Chinese way of life for so long. Liang argued that China’s “cultural core would have to be altered” by the introduction of “Western studies”—meaning, most assuredly, not the likes of Plato, Aristotle, and the Christian theologians but John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Spencer’s doctrines in particular meshed well with Legalist notions. 

With the downfall of the hapless reform emperor Guangxu, Liang soon found himself exiled. He was welcomed to Japan by the modernizers there, as were a number of Chinese reformers and future revolutionists, including Chiang Kai-Shek. “The source of the backwardness of the Chinese,” Liang “now argued forcefully, was his country’s lack of guojia sixiang or ‘national consciousness,’ and their congenital inability to imagine themselves as active participants, as guomin, ‘citizens,’ of a modern nation-state.” Unless this changed, the Spencerian survival of the fittest would extinguish China altogether. “That the strong always rule the weak is in truth the first great universal rule of nature,” he wrote, for “in the world there is only power—there is no other force,” and surely no real moral force. “Liberty” and “democracy,” yes, but strength first. No unalienable natural rights need apply, since nature is amoral. Hence his radicalism. His “new citizens” must completely destroy “the baggage of China’s traditional value system” or, as Liang himself wrote, “overturn things from their foundations and create a new world.” Although he would later distance himself from this policy, “the young future founders of Chinese communism, Chen Duxiu and Mao Zedong,” did not. Indeed, Mao “would adopt with a vengeance the motto ‘Destruction before construction’ during the Cultural Revolution” of the 1960s. 

After visiting the United States in 1903 (he met, among others, Theodore Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan), Liang “reluctantly concluded that the Chinese people were, at least for the present, incapable of democracy,” fit only “for despotism.” “Freedom, constitutionalism, and republicanism,” he wrote, “would be like hempen clothes in winter or furs in summer; it is not that they are not beautiful, they are just not suitable for us.” Still insisting on rapid modernization, “I returned from America to dream of Russia,” where Stolypin was undertaking what turned out to be a noble but failed attempt to inculcate civic education under the command of enlightened despotism. Or, looking at English history, he wrote that a Chinese “Cromwell alive today [would] carry out harsh rule, and with iron and fire to forge and temper our countrymen for twenty, thirty, even fifty years. After that we can give them the books of Rousseau and tell them about the deeds of Washington.” Like so many political writers, he came increasingly to suppose that there was no hope for his country “unless I return to take the reins of government.” With the overthrow of the Qing Dynasty in January 1912, Liang imagined that he saw his chance, but he proved ineffective in politics, accepting a series of governmental appointments in the fragile republic. He left for Europe, only to become disenchanted with Europeans as well, after they immolated themselves in the Great War, surviving with just enough strength to favor Japan over China in the Treaty of Versailles. Indeed, the war had caused Europeans to become disenchanted with themselves, with the modern project by which they had conquered the world. “The European people have had a big dream about the omnipotence of science. Now they are talking about its bankruptcy” in the wake of the war’s “selfishness, slaughter, corruption, and shamelessness.” Could China learn from the West’s mistakes?

Evidently not, at least not with the meager moral and intellectual resources at hand. Hoping to find a Confucian middle ground between “Marxists and anarchists on the Left, nationalists and authoritarians on the right,” Liang “invited like-minded big thinkers from around the world—John Dewey, Bertrand Russell, and Rabindranath Tagore—to China to spread their enlightened humanistic and liberal teachings,” while editing a new journal, Emancipation and Reconstruction, in which he “offered up a cocktail of Keynesian economics, Deweyan democracy, and globalized Confucian humanism.” That wouldn’t work, either. He died in 1929.

Rather more formidable was Liang’s contemporary, Sun Yat Sen. Having been educated in Hawaii, he understood the American regime specifically, and the West generally, better than “anyone else of his time” in China. “No Chinese leader since has come to close to matching the ease with which he was able to navigate the world outside China.” Upon his return, he settled in cosmopolitan Hong Kong, becoming a surgeon, before returning to Hawaii in 1894 to found the Revive China Society, dedicated to fomenting armed uprising in Canton, then moving again to Japan in the aftermath of the Sino-Japanese War. Although many other reformers found him “too detached from China’s reality, even un-Chinese,” Sun by that very token understood Chinese inferiority to ‘the moderns’ without sentimentality. And when the republican revolution did occur he was invited to return to China, becoming its provisional president. Seeing that he had no domestic political base, feeling his lack of governing experience, and rejecting the figurehead status his sponsors had in mind for him, he resigned after only forty-five days in office. This turned out to be fortuitous as well as prudent, since he could not be said to have failed and opened the chance for him to build up an independent political base, the Guomindang or Nationalist Party, which he founded in 1912. 

In doing so, he reckoned on Confucianism to serve as what the authors call “an essential field of cultural gravity for Han Chinese as they sought to rejuvenate their country,” holding, with the Confucianists, that “the structural relationship between Chinese citizens and the state begins with the family, extends to the clan, and only afterward the nation.” That is, Sun intended to sunder Confucianism from the blunders of the Manchu Qin Dynasty, as seen in his book, Three People’s Principles, published in the early 1920s. The first of these principles was nationalism, by which he meant ethnicity rather than nation-statism, an ethnicity to counter the threat of racial extinction posed by the dominance of ‘whites.’ Such ethnic nationalism could serve as an agent of civil-social cohesion, unifying China against economic concessions made to Western imperialists in the previous century. 

He supplemented ethnic nationalism with his second principle, the “rights of the people.” The authors are careful to explain that Sun’s “conception of rights was not of the kind of natural or God-given rights that Enlightenment thinkers viewed as the birthright of all human beings” but rather instruments of Chinese “wealth and power.” “Like so many other Chinese reformers and even revolutionaries”—one might add, in view of the future CCP, especially revolutionaries—when “push came to shove, Sun came down on the side of order, not the rights of the people” in the Western sense. And so, in Sun’s words, “the individual should not have too much liberty, but the nation should have complete liberty”; “we must each sacrifice our personal freedom…if we want to restore China’s liberty,” with nationalism as the cement uniting the “sheet of loose sand” which the four hundred million Chinese then comprised.

Minsbeng zhuyi, the “livelihood of the people,” constituted Sun’s third “people’s principle.” He opposed Marxism, with its doctrine of class warfare, dreaming instead of social equality brought about by taxation and purchase of property by the government, which would then redistribute lands to peasants and give the people generally a chance to invest in economic development. 

In politics he wanted first, Liang-like, to dismantle existing political structures, then to establish “a period of ‘political tutelage,’ when a provisional government would be promulgated” while “a strong ‘transitional’ government would rule.” This would be followed by “the implementation of full ‘constitutional government,’ which would happen only ‘after the attainment of political stability throughout the country.'” Likening the officials of the transitional government to chauffeurs who would do the driving even as the passengers expected to be delivered to the destination of their own choosing, Sun modeled his nationalist party not on any existing Western republican party but on Lenin’s Communist Party, whose supposed efficiency, so-called ‘democratic centralism,’ and anti-imperialism he admired. Needless to say, Lenin played on this, interesting Sun in exploring a Soviet-backed “United Front” between his Nationalists and Mao’s newly-formed Chinese Communist Party, against the Western imperialists and China’s regional warlords. Sensibly enough, Sun insisted, nonetheless, that “if there was going to be a United Front, he was going to be boss,” and that there would be no “Communistic order” in China. The thing did get off the ground in January 1923; “even Mao Zedong and Chen Duxiu incongruously became active members of the Nationalist Party through this marriage of convenience,” with Mao sighing, “the great cause of revolution is no easy matter.” The Front brought Soviet economic and military aid to Sun, and among those who received military training in Moscow was Chiang Kai-Shek. Sun died in 1925, never ceasing to “openly admire what Lenin had accomplished in Russia”—in his eyes, overthrowing an ossified monarchy and forging a modern state. 

“A studious and excitable man,” Chen Duxiu was schooled in the Chinese classics but detested the examination system, joined the Communist Party, but became increasingly nationalistic in reaction to Japanese imperialism. Unlike Sun, and like Marx, he rejected the traditional family, complaining that Chinese “care about their family and do not care about their nation,” making it difficult for China to defend itself against foreign encroachment. The collapse of the Qing Dynasty and the subsequent decline of the Chinese republic into “warlordism and dictatorship” impelled him to place his hopes on the next generation of “newly educated youths who, if they could be inspired by enlightened mentors into the right kind of nationalist pride, might yet rise to the challenge of awakening their country to all that threatened it.” As Liang had done, he founded a journal to further this project; New Youth attracted a wide audience because it featured the kind of iconoclastic debate not seen before in China. It also featured fiction written by Lu Xun, “a true master of modern Chinese prose and short fiction, whose first contribution, ‘Diary of a Madman,’ caused an intellectual sensation and became an instant literary classic,” working the angle of the man who sees things as they are and is therefore regarded as mad by everyone around him. Despising Confucianism as “the ethics of a feudal age,” he wrote an essay claiming that the world must choose one of two roads: “the road of light which leads to democracy, science and atheism; and the other, the road of darkness leading to despotism, superstition and divine authority.” He urged the Chinese to follow “Mr. Science and Mr. Democracy.” He therefore rejected Sun’s strategy of state-building first, democracy second, arguing that democracy can only be learned by doing. As was characteristic of all these thinkers, however, he advocated liberal democracy primarily as a tool for releasing national energy; “if there were other pathways that could do the same thing more efficiently, fine—which is why, by the end of 1919, he became interested in Marxism-Leninism, with profound historical consequences.”

Liberal democracy hadn’t failed the West but the democracies themselves had failed China, transferring Germany’s rights and concessions in Shandong Province to Japan instead of returning them to his country, first by a secret treaty and then formally at the Paris Peace Conference, despite President Wilson’s anti-imperialist principles enunciated in the Fourteen Points. “For Chinese patriots, these Japanese demands were the final indignity, a guarantee that their country would never cease to be cannibalized by foreign powers.” At this, Chen turned to Marxism, which could now be presented in China “as a fairer form of ‘democracy'” than anything on offer by the liberal democracies of the West. More, Marxism’s self-proclaimed status as ‘scientific socialism’ equally appealed to Chen. Finally, the character of the Chinese themselves, he by now concluded, was too stupid and narrow-minded, too irresponsible for self-government. Like Russia, China needed a vanguard of Leninist professional revolutionaries to get its people organized—a sort of transfer of authority from a Confucian elite to a Communist elite.” Chen’s disillusionment with liberal democracy, shared by Mao, “represented an enormous sea change among Chinese intellectuals,” who (somewhat paradoxically) sought in Marxism-Leninism a means of restoring national greatness. This denial of Marxist-Leninist internationalism eventually got him in trouble with Joseph Stalin, who removed him from his post as the CCP’s first general secretary in 1927, then expelled him from the party two years later, guilty of “rightist opportunism.” Understandably, Chen began to prefer the tolerant ways of liberal democracy, again. He lived to see the beginning of the Second World War but was spared from witnessing the triumph of the Communists in the years after it.

His younger contemporary, Chiang Kai-Shek, was not so lucky, although much more politically successful. Classically educated but no intellectual, he studied in Japan in 1905, intent on learning the techniques of modernization in an Asian society; as an ally of Sun during the Nationalist Party’s outreach to Lenin, he studied military and party organization in Moscow in 1923. “By the time of Sun’s death in 1925, the ambitious Chiang had come to view his life as inseparably intertwined with the destiny of his country,” setting his party and the nation on a successful military expedition to northern China against the warlords. With this “stunning and unexpected triumph,” he consolidated Nationalist rule under the slogan “Abolish the unequal treaties.” By 1928, he chaired the Political Council for a new administration controlled by the Nationalists. Until this time, “few had had much confidence in China’s future.”

A year earlier, Chiang had turned on the Communists, ending the National Front alliance with a massacre of Communist labor leaders. He was confident he could “reunify the country without the Communists”; had it not been for Japanese imperial ambitions, he might have been correct. But the Japanese military was considerably more formidable than the Chinese warlords. Chiang’s forces failed to seize the territories granted to Japan at Versailles. Worse, in 1931 Japan seized Manchuria, making it into a Japanese puppet state, partly because Chiang had decided that fighting the Communists in central China was more important. This undercut his own ideological legitimacy as a nationalist, and by 1937 Japan threated Beijing and Shanghai, then massacred and raped tens of thousands of Chinese in Nanjing, Chiang’s capital city. During the Second World War, Japanese forces moved around China with impunity. Chiang was caught between Mao’s Communists and the imperial powers of the West and of Japan; even his necessary military alliance with the United States and Great Britain during the war left his nationalist credentials tarnished. In his 1943 book, China’s Destiny, he excoriates “the poison of foreign economic oppression” and the “dangerous and maliciously ruthless intrigues and methods of the imperialists.” For their part, the Americans became frustrated with Chiang’s refusal to commit his Nationalist forces fully to the war against Japan. 

Through it all, Chiang remained loyal to Sun’s program of state-building first, democracy later. He propounded a doctrine called the “New Culture”—in fact an amalgam of Confucian and Christian principles, “an effort too many educated Chinese dismissed as retrograde and simple-minded,” and one with little appeal among the peasants. His tightly organized political party, drawing upon Lenin’s Bolsheviks and even, briefly in the 1930s, fascism and Nazism, proved a stronger means of maintaining such national unity as could be mustered against the Communist faction. The authors caution against over-reading this latter flirtation: “Chiang’s fascist tendencies were far more muted than those of his European counterparts,” in some measure because “his authoritarianism was closer to that of traditional Chinese secret societies than mass-based political organization.”

Unfortunately for Chiang and for China, Mao proved “the master” of “mass political organization,” defeating the Nationalists and driving them onto Taiwan in 1949. There, after many years of what Chiang’s mentor, Sun, had called “political tutelage,” Taiwan eventually liberalized its regime under the rule of his son, Ching-kuo, proving “that Chinese were not somehow congenitally incapable of sustaining democratic governance, and thus enabled Chinese everywhere to imagine for the first time how, with further political maturation, perhaps even mainlanders could someday look forward to living in a more open political system.”

Chairman Mao had other ideas, mostly Stalinist. He had loathed the Confucian texts since childhood, admiring the Legalists, who “emphasized the law as a way for the state to control its people, including government officials, through strict punishment, and thereby maintain order and increase their collective wealth and well-being,” with no pesky protections of the “people’s rights against the state.” He concurred with the early twentieth-century trend (exemplified in the United States by Theodore Roosevelt but powerful throughout Europe, as well) which countered the relative ease of modern life, with its urbanization and gadgets, with what TR called “the strenuous life” of vigorous physical exercise and military training. Mao’s first contribution to Chen Duxiu’s New Life magazine was an article promoting physical fitness. As he turned toward Marxism a bit later on, he retained an admiration for strength of will that lay uneasily with Marxist determinism. After a stint as a librarian at Peking University, he returned to his home province of Hunan. There, he observed not an urban proletariat but a dispossessed peasantry, “who had been largely written off by urban intellectuals as an ignorant and inert segment of society, of little use to proletarian Marxist revolution or individualist liberal reform.” “Mao was almost alone” in seeing revolutionary possibilities and organizational potential in the countryside; in this, he again parted from Marxism but not from Lenin, who had seen much the same thing in Russia. Indeed, by 1927 he found that the peasants were “far more cocked, loaded, and ready to revolt than intellectuals or urban workers,” having already rebelled against the local landlords, “seizing lands rented to them at usurious rates.” Accordingly, “Mao’s simple solution to the problem of making Marxism work in an overwhelmingly agricultural society was to turn China’s greatest weakness, its rural poor”—some eighty percent of the population—into “its ultimate strength.” 

Peasant rebellion would require what Mao called “a brief reign of terror in every rural area” to repress the “counterrevolutionaries” and “overthrow the authority of the gentry.” Unlike Confucians, who regarded disorder as a sign of decadence, and unlike modern ‘state-builders’ who seek relief from the natural war of all against all, Mao considered violent collisions “as creative and regenerative motor forces of progress” or, in his words, “the locomotive of history.” “His writing became ever more replete with upbeat allusions to storms, upheavals, tornados, tempests, tides, and waves”—naturalistic metaphors for Marxian historical dialectic. As late as the 1966 “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (as he styled it), he announced that there was “no need to be afraid of tidal waves,” since “human society has been evolved out of tidal waves.” Departing from Marx and Lenin, who, with Hegel, posited a future ‘end of History’ in which all dialectic would cease, departing equally from the similar Legalist expectation of “The Great Harmony,” Mao regarded revolution as a permanent condition among human societies and indeed throughout the cosmos, writing, “the suppression of the the old by the new is a general, eternal and inviolable law of the universe.” Even after securing tyrannical power over China he would repeatedly refresh the dialectic, murdering millions in such bloodbaths as the “Rectification Campaign” of 1942, “The Great Leap Forward” of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the aforementioned “Cultural Revolution.” He especially detested anything suggesting ‘idealism’ or the separation of theory from practice, anything “detached from the revolutionary reality he most cared about,” anything that might ossify the dialectical process. No trace of Confucian sagacity or its institutional embodiment, imperial bureaucracy, must survive, as it did in the Soviet Union, after Stalin died. 

To achieve this, Mao killed millions but preferred to ‘re-educate.’ “Those accused of ‘erroneous thinking’ were first to be given an invitation by the party to ‘reform’ themselves through a process that came to be known as ‘criticism and self-criticism,'” to be followed if necessary by “public criticism” by right-minded Party members, “shaming, persecution, prison, or worse.” Thus “wayward comrades were artfully made complicit in the process of their own ideological remolding.” Similarly, writers and artists must understand that nothing they do can be “independent of politics,” as literature and art should rather become, in Mao’s words, “a powerful weapon for uniting and educating the people and for crushing and destroying the enemy” and, complementarily, a cog serving “a constructive part of the whole revolutionary machine.” “There was really no way to reconstruct the kind of ‘new man,’ ‘new culture,’ and ‘new China’ that Mao had been conjuring up in his revolutionary imagination since his youth, short of first being willing to erase the past that lay so stubbornly rooted within each and every Chinese.” As he put it, “a clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it. The newest and most beautiful picture can be painted on it.” At this, the authors pause to express their astonishment that Mao could bring himself “to describe a people possessed of so many millennia of history and so steeped in a traditional culture as ‘blank.'” They go on to acknowledge that the permanent revolution was designed to serve as the great eraser. “This man Hitler was even more ferocious” than we have been, Mao confided to his inner circle. “The more ferocious the better, don’t you think? The more people you kill, the more revolutionary you are.” 

Bizarrely, the authors end their account of Mao with praise for his “agility and innovation,” which I suppose is one way of putting it. It is at any rate understandable that the Chinese themselves looked for less dialectical drama, in the wake of the Great Helmsman’s demise in 1976. The task of consolidation fell to Deng Xiaoping, who returned China to the quest for wealth and power, away from exhausting permanent revolution. True, “Deng would prove almost as ruthless as Mao in silencing his critics, most notably the outspoken democracy advocate Wei Jing-sheng.” He preferred to put cultural politics aside in order “to foment a new kind of frenzy—for making money.”  His best-known slogan was “Yellow or white, a cat that catches mice is a good cat.” Although left exposed to Red Guard persecution during the Cultural Revolution, “his loyalty to the Communist Part and Leninism’s founding principles never wavered,” and he proved “a master in the arts of political organization…putting the right people in the right places, keeping machinery running, making appropriate corrections at key times, and enforcing party loyalty.” That is, he was exactly the kind of bureaucratic operator Mao despised but the Communist Party, and even Mao himself, needed, especially when the old man needed someone “to counterbalance the influence of his wife’s power-hungry leftist faction” in the years immediately following the Cultural Revolution. He fully endorsed Mao’s overtures to the United States during the second term of the Nixon administration, seeking, as he said “to make use of capital from foreign countries and of their advanced technology and experience in business management.” Readers of Lenin will recall his New Economic Policy of the 1920s, which sought to do just that.

“By 1975, Deng was running much of the People’s Republic,” combining modest economic liberalization with “Leninist ruthlessness in the face of resistance.”  Given his organizational skills, he had no trouble in taking formal control, a year later. “Let us advance courageously to change the backward condition of our country and turn it into a modern and powerful socialist state” by “learn[ing] to manage the economy by economic means.” Economic means in the hands of Deng did not closely resemble the ideas of Adam Smith, however. The means of production and of distribution, along with the levers of political power, would remain in the firm grip of the Communist Party. Calling upon the Chinese to “emancipate their minds,” he took care to provide a firm framework within which that emancipation took place: “adherence to socialism, people’s democratic dictatorship, party leadership, and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist thought,” and most assuredly “not bourgeois, individualist democracy.” What Deng meant by “political reform” was really “administrative reform”; “the party’s political monopoly over government appointment should remain sacrosanct.” As he told a visiting European socialist, “the greatest advantage of the socialist system is that when the central leadership makes a decision, it is promptly implemented without interference from any other quarters.”

The formula worked for nearly a decade, but by the mid-1980s inflation and corruption had begun to eat away at socialism. Civil-social clamor for democratization surged, culminating in the murderous crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989. The crisis had threatened the Party’s cohesion. And so, Deng, having implemented a version of Lenin’s N.E.P., initiated what amounted to a (mildly) Stalinist correction of the ‘excesses’ his reforms had engendered. The crisis passed and in 1997, like Mao, Deng died peacefully abed. 

His successors, President Jian Zemin and Premier Zhu Ronji, followed the Dengian line. Zhu saw that “if the party would help the people create wealth, the people would let the party keep power,” without much of that nasty democratization talk. The N.E.P. would be extended indefinitely, provided that such economic liberalization as occurred took place on Party terms. “The days of the Chinese Communist Party seeking legitimacy through class revolution and ideological purity had now morphed into something quite new and pragmatic. Legitimacy was to be derived almost entirely from delivering on the promise of prosperity.” ‘Democratic centralism’ was to be supplemented by ‘economic centralism.’ “Zhu’s genius was that he managed to centralize without strangling the economy.” To do this (as the authors do not quite see) Zhu shifted Mao’s idea of permanent revolution into the Chinese economy by implementing policies of “continuous reform,” centering on the fiscal and financial systems on the one hand, the state sector of the economy on the other. Respecting the latter, he addressed the state-owned enterprises, getting rid of small and medium-sized firms but preserving the big ones. At the same time, and crucially, he insisted that the Party members who ran the surviving SOEs be competent, not merely loyal to the Party. 

“At the time, Western onlookers”—ever intent on seeing what they wanted to see in enemy regimes—were pleased to “celebrate such reforms as evidence of China’s inevitable economic liberalization,” which they understood as privatization. The characteristically clueless ex-president, George H. W. Bush, politely asked, “How is the privatization program in China coming along?” to which Zhu replied in astonishment, “Mr. Bush, China isn’t privatizing. We’re creating a shareholding system,” streamlining the SOEs but most decidedly not eliminating state ownership of the means of production. “The majority of shares must remain under state control.” Further, the ever-growing calls for ‘globalization’ didn’t impress the Chinese rulers, despite their pleasure in being admitted into the World Trade Organization. He continued to think in Leninist terms, those of allowing foreign capitalists to make the rope with which Communists eventually will hang them. And as for democracy, the political dimension of globalization as conceived in the West, Zhu “flatly rejected…the relevance of liberal democracy to China, saying that the problem was not just that the Chinese people were unready for democracy,” as Sun and his line of statesman had asserted, “but rather that democracy had never been, and would never be, suitable for China.” In his words, “We absolutely will not copy the Western model as we reform our political system,” admitting a variety of political parties or establishing a bicameral legislature.

Writer, political activist, “loner and iconoclast” Liu Xiaobo hoped for a better regime than that. He died in state custody a few years after this book was published, having been awarded a Nobel Prize while in jail. The authors allow that “although the ideals of thinkers like Liu Xiaobo have not been the main motor force of Chinese history to date, it is impossible to know how they might ultimately come to play themselves out in the future.” Liu himself knew the score, writing that “China’s so-called intelligentsia is, for the most part, the dictator’s conspirator and accomplice”; as for the people, “the Chinese love to look up to the famous, thereby saving themselves the trouble of thinking”—a weakness not limited to China. The Chinese national ethic, he continued, “is disconnected from civic values,” rather more “a primitive jungle ethic of master and slave” whereby the people “act like slaves” in front of the strong, “like masters” “in front of the weak.” As a result, “the spirit of the entire people” has been poisoned by the likes of Mao, with his fomenting of class hatred. As for the later system of crony capitalism, it has enriched the Communist Party oligarchs, leading to “a robber baron’s paradise, a free-for-all,” turning Chinese intellectuals “into a pack of complacent cynics” who have collaborated with Party hacks to a fake Confucianism, “a sales pitch that combines tall tales about the ancients with insights that are about as sophisticated as the lyrics of pop songs.”  The ‘Chinese miracle’ is “the miracle of systematic corruption; the ‘miracle’ of an unjust society; the ‘miracle’ of moral decline; and the ‘miracle’ of a squandered future.” The only real miracle would be recovery from it all.

Such talk attracted the unfavorable attention of the Party, which kept Liu in jail for many of the last twenty years of his life. Inexplicably, the authors insist that China’s “search” for “wealth and power” “may well converge” with republicanism. They are happy with Mao’s “demolition job on China’s ‘old society,” which “finally free[d] Chinese from their traditional moorings”—a “brutal interim” which “was perhaps the essential, but paradoxical, precursor to China’s subsequent boom” and “the antecedent to the Chinese people being able to free themselves at last from their past and catapult themselves into their present single-minded and unrestrained pursuit of wealth and power.” The authors ask, cogently, “Toward what end?” They recur to the standard claim that as the Chinese become more affluent they will want “a more open and law-abiding society,” and that even the leaders, supposedly “yearning” for “international respect,” will move “toward a more consultative, if not democratic, form of government.” 

It is hard to resist considering these sentiments the rubbish of political pietism.

 

 

 

Michael R. Auslin: Asia’s New Geopolitics: Essays on Reshaping the Indo-Pacific. Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 2020.

 

China has emerged as the main geopolitical threat to the United States. An oligarchy, the Chinese regime opposes commercial republican regimes throughout the world, rightly regarding them as a threat to its own. As the world’s most powerful commercial republic, the United States thus stands as Chinese Communist Party’s principal rival, an ally of Asian commercial republics—regimes the oligarchs regard as nearby and very bad examples for their own at times restive people.

In this regime struggle, the Chinese have “steadily attempt[ed] to encroach throughout the Indo-Pacific, linking maritime and land trade routes under the umbrella of the One Belt One Road initiative, while expanding the operational capabilities of the People’s Liberation Navy and Air Force in waters and skies far from China’s shores.” This territory extends to Japan and Guam in the east and westward into and beyond the Indian Ocean. That is, the Chinese seek to extend their trade routes and their military simultaneously, even as the United States has done, but on the foundation of an oligarchic regime strategy rather than a commercial-republican regime strategy. Both countries encourage ‘regime change’ but the regimes they support are opposites.

Auslin finds a source for the geopolitical (as distinguished from the regime-change) strategies in the 1944 book by Nicholas John Spykman, The Geography of the Peace. Whereas previous geopolitical thinkers pointed to the open seas (Mahan) and the central continental land masses (Mackinder) as the flashpoints of war in the twentieth century, Spykman saw “that it is in the rimlands”—the coastal areas on and near the Eurasian land mass—that “the real conflict had taken place,” especially during the Second World War. “According to Spykman, the most crucial waterways or global power were the North Sea and the Mediterranean in Europe, the Persian Gulf and littoral waters of the western Indian Ocean in the Middle East, and the East and South China Seas, along with the Yellow Sea, in Asia.” By the time Spykman’s book appeared, Mackinder himself had seen the same thing—as indeed statesmen had done.

Auslin recommends that the United States “acknowledge bluntly that China is contesting control not of the high seas, like Germany in World War I or Japan in World War II, but of the marginal seas and skies of Asia, even while the United States remains dominant on the high seas of the Pacific.” This will “clarif[y] our understanding of Chinese military activity in the region,” showing “the area under risk and the geopolitical pivot of the Indo-Pacific,” which might be described as “the Asian Mediterranean”—namely, “the integrated waters of the Sea of Japan, the Yellow Sea, and the East and South China Seas.” The passageways between those waters and the Indian Ocean (e.g., the Strait of Malacca) see one-third of the world’s commercial traffic, forming “the hinge between maritime Eurasia and the entire Western Hemisphere.” Americans should teach themselves to see as Spykman saw: “control of the Asiatic Mediterranean means control of Asia.” They should then draw the necessary policy consequence for today: “to ensure that no aggressive power gains control” over it. Failing that, allies and partners will “consider either severing ties with the United States or declaring neutrality so as to preserve their own freedom of action.”

China seeks “to reshape the world to fit its interests, picking and choosing which Western norms it adopts and which it ignores”; it ignores many of them, being “actively antagonistic to many of the values that created the post-1945 world.” Unfortunately, in the years following the collapse of the Soviet empire, most American foreign policy experts ignored China’s fairly obvious intentions just as much as the Chinese Communist Party ignored American hopes and dreams. “A China that was increasingly treated as a near peer of the United States and pulled into the global system would eventually, if fitfully, begin to manifest liberal tendencies,” the Americans supposed, because “even authoritarian Chinese leaders would be forced to grant more power to their middle class, if only to keep it supportive, and to further open their society, since development ultimately depended on cultural changes that ensured a fertile field for further capitalist-style modes of organization.” As Auslin nicely puts it, “perhaps having been transfixed by their own beliefs, liberal nations are now disappointed and surprised that a China that has reached the heights of global power is increasingly refusing to play by the global script expected of it.”

Why such complacency? Auslin doesn’t venture a guess. Among American ‘experts,’ the problem had two dimensions. First, although Americans and Europeans were fully cognizant of the importance of political regimes, having finally overcome the Soviet oligarchy, they knew very little about the Chinese oligarchs. Even during Mao’s tyranny, Western analysts failed to see Mao’s affinities for Stalinism, right down to his use of mass murder as an instrument of socioeconomic transformation. And they grossly underestimated the competence and toughness of Mao’s successors, together with their intentions. Second, Western analysts were progressives, assuming that ‘History’ was ‘on our side,’ that the momentum of events that had toppled the Russian communists would deliver the same benign outcome in China. On the contrary, the Chinese communists learned from the Soviet collapse and got busy “smothering…domestic liberal trends and prevent[ing]…the further growth of civil society inside China, all to forestall any domestic liberalization, such as threatened the CCP in 1989,” when partisans of republican regime change demonstrated in Tiananmen Square. The consequences of liberal-democratic folly now lie exposed.

“The world may never fully know the degree to which American and other advanced nations unknowingly subsidized the growth of the Chinese economy” through providing university education to Chinese students and through failing to prevent the theft of trade secrets. “Beijing has found all-too-willing counterparts in both foreign businesses and governments, all of whom find it easier to buckle under increasingly outrageous Chinese demands than to risk losing their economic access by taking a critical stand.” More, China has begun to demand “that its foreign partners surrender Western values and openly espouse China’s worldview for continued access to its markets.” Among these partners stands the bland dolt now running the Apple corporation, Tim Cook, who has averred, “We believe in engaging with government even when we disagree.” Of course he does. 

Chinese technological and economic growth have in turned enabled the regime to develop advanced weaponry “designed to target the strengths of U.S. forces in Asia” and “to project Chinese power throughout the waters of the Indo-Pacific region.” Chinese policy “is traceable directly to the worldview and ideology of the Chinese Communist Party,” that is, to the way of life and purposes of the Chinese regime.

Or, as stated in an early policy statement issued by Premier Xi Jinping titled “Communiqué on the Current State of the Ideological Sphere,” China faces a “complicated, intense struggle” with the West generally and the United States in particular over “false ideological trends” such as “Western constitutional democracy,” “universal values,” “civil society,” and “neoliberalism,” all of them contradictory to the principles of the Chinese regime, described as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” or, to use a somewhat more charged formula, national socialism. To counter these “trends,” the Chinese regime works through its overseas propaganda arm, the United Front Work Department, founded by Mao in 1939, nearly a decade before his Communist Party forces seized power on the Chinese mainland. Today, the United Front aims at influencing government officials, executives of commercial and media corporations, and academics worldwide with a combination of carrots and sticks. Payoffs include the refusal of Czech and Greek officials to support the European Union’s condemnation of human rights violations in China and of its depredations in the South China Sea. In addition, “Australian politics have been rocked in recent years by allegations of massive Chinese donations to politicians.” It is easy to predict that the United States will see similar scandals, at some point.

“Learning to live with a newly assertive Chinese military is the major security challenge facing Asian nations in the twenty-first century.” And not only Asia, and not only in exclusively military terms. “Chinese companies”—state-owned enterprises, all—have purchased port in several European countries while undertaking infrastructure and mining projects in Africa, Latin America, and even the Arctic. China offers loans to many countries, but the penalties for default run high; “Sri Lanka learned this the hard way in late 2017, when it was forced to hand over control of its largest port, Hambantota, to China after it could not pay off bills to Chinese firms,” thereby giving Beijing “a strategic outpost in the Indian Ocean.”  The military, political, and economic objectives of these enterprises are integrated, not separated, as one should expect. Americans in particular should see this—or would, if they remembered the Theodore Roosevelt’s geopolitical strategy.

Indeed, since the Chinese regime to some extent merely acts as any great power, including the United States, typically acts, what’s the problem. “Perhaps little of this would matter if China were evolving into a more liberal society, with an accountable government and more cooperative foreign policy.” It isn’t. Instead, the regime is doubling down on oppression at home while building its capabilities for continued power grabs abroad. The regime struggle between monarchic and oligarchic contempt for the natural rights of human beings did not end with the defeat of its two principal agents in the twentieth century, Germany and Russia. China has eagerly taken up that mantle.  

Given its sheer size, India might seem a credible counterweight to China. Auslin confines much of his analysis of India’s real weakness to criticisms of its failure to integrate its women into its political economy. The caste system, undergirded by the traditional practice of arranged marriages, has left too many Indian girls and women under-educated and under-employed. “In the country as a whole fewer than half of India’s women are literate”—a condition American women (for example) did not endure at any time in their nation’s history. India also suffers from excessive regionalism within its borders and worries about Pakistan, now a Chinese ally, on its border. 

That leaves Japan as the most viable ally of the United States in Asia. Feudalism there was modified by the seventeenth century, when the Tokugawa family raised itself to the status of first among equals. Feudalism itself collapsed in the late nineteenth century, as “lower-level ex-samurai deposed their feudal lords and took power, centralizing the state and forging Japan into a modern nation-state” capable of winning wars against China in 1895 and Russia in 1905. The regime of military oligarchy which had united the nation behind it would cause that nation, and the rest of the region, considerable agony by the time it was crushed, half a century later. In reaction to the severe punishments inflicted upon it for its imperial ambitions, Japan has remained somewhat ‘isolationist’ in its foreign policy, although hardly so in its economic policy. “Most Japanese appear to welcome the physical security brought about by Japan’s exclusionary nationalism, even as they choose how and when to integrate with the surrounding world.”

In terms of its regime, the Japanese oligarchy has been replaced by a mixed-regime type of commercial republic, wherein the emperor remains as the symbol of the nation, “the spiritual core of Japan,” and major corporate oligarchs wield considerable influence. The regime has succeeded “in providing a stable and secure life for its people, despite significant economic challenges and statistical stagnation” of its population, “maintaining cohesion at home and certain barriers against the world” without anything like the repression seen in China. Its educational system has proven especially effective, with Japanese students scoring at or near the top of standardized test scores, worldwide. 

In foreign policy, Japan is “likely to take a middle path” between isolationism and engagement with the world, “improving its high-end defensive capabilities and modernizing its forces while maintaining political limits on what those forces can do,” with the United States remaining “at the center of Japan’s security planning for the foreseeable future.” The Japanese might engage in joint military exercises with Australia and India while supplying arms to the smaller countries in Southeast Asia. “But Tokyo is unlikely to desire or sign any more mutual defense treaties, or to commit its forces to combat abroad,” even including naval operations in the South China Sea, which remains indispensable to its own commercial traffic.

In past centuries, China and Japan have confronted one another many times. Today, however, for the first time, both countries are “strong, united, global” powers, “well aware of the other’s strengths and their own weaknesses.” Neither country “has any real allies in Asia,” having preferred rather to dominate than to befriend the smaller powers, thereby “making it difficult to create bonds of trust,” as Auslin drily puts it. As China’s foreign minister put it during a meeting of representatives of Asian countries in 2010, “China is a big country and you are small countries.” Being the biggest of the big, and given big India’s relative disarray, China may well “secure its goals, at least in the short run, if not longer,” as the “smaller nations are under no illusion that they can successfully resist China’s encroachments.” Japan is reduced to the role of “a spoiler,” complicating China’s strategic calculations without being able to deter them. Overall, “ASEAN nations have focused more on the U.S.-China relationship, since it is the United States that has formal Southeast Asian allies and has inserted itself into the South China Sea dispute.” Japan nonetheless serves as an example to many Asian nations of how to win prosperity without despotism. 

What, then, can the United States do to counter Chinese ambitions, ambitions that aim at threatening American security and challenging the American regime? First, American strategists and American citizens generally need to understand the Indo-Pacific region as a whole. The American military already does, assigning responsibility for the area to its Indo-Pacific Command. The extraordinary diversity of geographic structures, languages, religions, and regimes featured in this region easily distracts analysts from understanding it as one thing, geopolitically. Accordingly, there has been “little in Washington’s policy that initially could be considered a comprehensive or consistent strategy, let alone a truly grand strategy”; the first attempt at framing such a strategy only occurred with the Pearl Harbor attacks in 1941, and it consisted of committing to a permanent military presence in the region, regime change in Japan, and containment of communism. Even then, “it was not until the Obama administration that a new, overarching [strategic] concept came to be articulated, the so-called pivot or rebalance to Asia.” This only spurred the Chinese rulers to accelerate their longstanding policies of military modernization, encroachments in the South China Sea, cyberattacks on American government and businesses, and “support for authoritarian regimes around the world.” 

Unluckily for even the Chinese, “the very size of the Indo-Pacific, with more than half of the world’s population, along with its complexity, political diversity, and numerous problems, means that no one power can dominate the region, as seems possible in a smaller, territorially contiguous realm like Europe.” Even hegemony is “difficult,” as Auslin expects the Chinese to learn. To hasten that learning curve, America should never ignore Chinese provocations, strengthen its alliances with India, Taiwan, Japan, and South Korea, and defend free trade throughout the region.

This notwithstanding, Auslin ends his book with a cautionary tale, “the Sino-American Littoral War of 2045.”  Having already taken effective military control of the South China Sea, “through which as much as 70 percent of global trade passed,” and having ignored a decision by The Hague’s Permanent Court of Arbitration in favor of the Philippines against China in 2016 (why worry, since no one moved to enforce it?), and having noted the Obama administration’s hesitation to conduct military operations in the area many years earlier, China had continued its military buildup in the region. This eventually induced Taiwan to enter into a Hong Kong-like ‘one country-two systems’ agreement while persuading South Korea to end its alliance with the United States. Three blocs then emerged in the Indo-Pacific: U.S.-Japan-Australia; China/Taiwan-South Korea; the nonaligned ASEAN countries. India and Russia contented themselves with playing on the edges; Europeans withdrew from the region altogether.

One thing having led to others, the 2045 war was fought in the continental seas and littorals; the United States avoided the Chinese mainland while the Chinese refrained from attacking Japan. The denouement occurred when America’s Japanese-based forces were stopped and the Chinese proposed a ceasefire before the U.S. Navy could bring in reinforcements from Hawaii and San Diego. Having gained firm control over its adjacent seas and littorals, China “was willing to cease combat operations to consolidate its significant gains, while the United States accepted its strategic losses and did not want to widen the war, which could have resulted in further defeat,” thanks to the now-proven effectiveness of Chinese military technology. American statesmen reduced U.S. military presence in the region, regrouping their forces in Japan and Australia. Chinese advances more or less stopped there, however. “Beijing soon discovered that its unwilling allies required the investment of Chinese political, economic, and military capital, which restricted Beijing’s freedom of action postbellum.” For its part, America could only rest semi-content as “an offshore balancer,” its alliances in the region weakened.

“As the cold peace settled on the region, the Chinese and American blocs settled down into a prolonged contest for influence in Asia.”