The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America As The Superpower
By Phar Kim Beng
Founder/Chair
Strategic Pan Indo-Pacific Arena
Strategicpipa.com
Twitter: @indo_pan
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Michael Pillsbury, who has a Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University, has been a top American strategist on China since 1970. It was he, rather than Henry Kissinger, who conceived the strategy to use China to counterbalance the Soviet Union in the mid 1970s, culminating with the normalization of Sino US relationship during the tenure of President Jimmy Carter in 1979.
But, even well before that, Pillsbury’s idea had been well received by President Richard Nixon prior to his forced resignation over Watergate. Given such a colorful background, it is amazing to see him making an argument in the complete reverse: that the US should now find ways to contain and constrain China. Why?
This is because China has always harbored the ambition of becoming the world’s leading power, supplanting the role of the United States. Such an argument is all good and well. After all, China is indeed growing at twice the rate of the United States. But the gross domestic product of the United States alone has reached USD 16 trillion, several times larger than China and even Japan combined.
Perhaps the race towards becoming the proverbial top dog of international relations, as the realist theory of international relations has it, is driven by peer rivalry, and the fear of losing one’s relatives gains. China is not winning but losing to the United States in various metrics i.e. hard power, soft power, even smart power. Invariably, to counter the phenomenal resources of the US, which combine the hard power of the Pentagon, with the soft power of Hollywood, China has had to think hard and long on how to deal with the US more comprehensively. One of the outcomes of such a race is the One Maritime Belt and One Silk Road (OBOR) strategy, which strangely Michael Pilsbury did not give any significant weight. Not surprisingly, this is a book that gives one a peek of American insecurity too viz China, not necessarily China’s angst and anxieties alone viz the US.
