Excerpts from “The Hundred-Year Marathon” book Part 1

My [the author’s] faith was first shaken in 1997, when I was among those encouraged to visit China to witness the emergence of “democratic” elections in a village near the industrial town of Dongguan. While visiting, I had a chance to talk in Mandarin with the candidates and see how the elections actually worked. The unwritten rules of the game soon became clear: the candidates were allowed no public assemblies, no television ads, and no campaign posters. They were not allowed to criticize any policy implemented by the Communist Party, nor were they free to criticize their opponents on any issue. There would be no American-style debates over taxes or spending or the country’s future. The only thing a candidate could do was to compare his personal qualities to those of his opponent. Violations of these rules were treated as crimes.

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The Marathon strategy that China’s leaders are pursuing today—and have been pursuing for decades—is largely the product of lessons derived from the Warring States period by the hawks. The nine principal elements of Chinese strategy, which form the basis of the Hundred-Year Marathon, include the following:

1. Induce complacency to avoid alerting your opponent. Chinese strategy holds that a powerful adversary, such as the United States today, should never be provoked prematurely. Instead, one’s true intentions should be completely guarded until the ideal moment to strike arrives.

2. Manipulate your opponent’s advisers. Chinese strategy emphasizes turning the opponent’s house in on itself by winning over influential advisers surrounding the opponent’s leadership apparatus. Such efforts have long been a hallmark of China’s relations with the United States.

3. Be patient—for decades, or longer—to achieve victory. During the Warring States period, decisive victories were never achieved quickly. Victory was sometimes achieved only after many decades of careful, calculated waiting. Today, China’s leaders are more than happy to play the waiting game.

4. Steal your opponent’s ideas and technology for strategic purposes. Hardly hindered by Western-style legal prohibitions and constitutional principles, China clearly endorses theft for strategic gain. Such theft provides a relatively easy, cost-effective means by which a weaker state can usurp power from a more powerful one.

5. Military might is not the critical factor for winning a long-term competition. This partly explains why China has not devoted more resources to developing larger, more powerful military forces. Rather than relying on a brute accumulation of strength, Chinese strategy advocates targeting an enemy’s weak points and biding one’s time.

6. Recognize that the hegemon will take extreme, even reckless action to retain its dominant position. The rise and fall of hegemons was perhaps the defining feature of the Warring States period. Chinese strategy holds that a hegemon—the United States, in today’s context—will not go quietly into the night as its power declines relative to others. Further, Chinese strategy holds that a hegemon will inevitably seek to eliminate all actual and potential challengers.

7. Never lose sight of shi. The concept of shi will be discussed in greater detail below. For now, suffice it to say that two elements of shi are critical components of Chinese strategy: deceiving others into doing your bidding for you, and waiting for the point of maximum opportunity to strike.

8. Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers. Chinese strategy places a high premium on assessing China’s relative power, during peacetime and in the event of war, across a plethora of dimensions beyond just military considerations. The United States, by contrast, has never attempted to do this.

9. Always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others. In what could be characterized as a deeply ingrained sense of paranoia, China’s leaders believe that because all other potential rivals are out to deceive them, China must respond with its own duplicity. In the brutal Warring States period, the naïve, trusting leader was not just unsuccessful in battle; he was utterly destroyed. Perhaps the greatest Chinese strategic fear is that of being encircled. In the ancient Chinese board game of wei qi, it is imperative to avoid being encircled by your opponent—something that can be accomplished only by simultaneously deceiving your opponent and avoiding being deceived by him. Today, China’s leaders operate on the belief that rival states are fundamentally out to encircle one another, the same objective as in wei qi.

Source: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower (2015) by Michael Pillsbury.

Interesting book. Principles every potential president should know to understand the Chi-Coms.