The Hundred-Year Marathon
China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower
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ISBN10: 1250081343
ISBN13: 9781250081346
Trade Paperback
352 Pages
$19.99
CA$26.99
For more than forty years, the United States has played an indispensable role helping the Chinese government build a booming economy, develop its scientific and military capabilities, and take its place on the world stage, in the belief that China's rise will bring us cooperation, diplomacy, and free trade. But what if the "China Dream" is to replace us, just as America replaced the British Empire, without firing a shot?
Based on interviews with Chinese defectors and newly declassified, previously undisclosed national security documents, The Hundred-Year Marathon reveals China's secret strategy to supplant the United States as the world's dominant power, and to do so by 2049, the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Michael Pillsbury, a fluent Mandarin speaker who has served in senior national security positions in the U.S. government since the days of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, draws on his decades of contact with the "hawks" in China's military and intelligence agencies and translates their documents, speeches, and books to show how the teachings of traditional Chinese statecraft underpin their actions. He offers an inside look at how the Chinese really view America and its leaders—as barbarians who will be the architects of their own demise.
Pillsbury also explains how the U.S. government has helped—sometimes unwittingly and sometimes deliberately—to make this "China Dream" come true, and he calls for the United States to implement a new, more competitive strategy toward China as it really is, and not as we might wish it to be. The Hundred-Year Marathon is a wake-up call as we face the greatest national security challenge of the twenty-first century.
Reviews
Praise for The Hundred-Year Marathon
“China’s ambition to become the world’s dominant power has been there all along, virtually burned into the country’s cultural DNA and hiding, as [Pillsbury] says, in plain sight . . . The author is correct to assert that China constitutes, by far, the biggest national challenge to America’s position in the world today.”—The Wall Street Journal
“Provocative . . . detailed and rigorous. [Pillsbury is] right that for Washington, assessing the nature of China’s ambition, and responding to it effectively, may be the central foreign policy challenge of our time.”—Newsweek
“Pungently written and rich in detail, this book deserves to enter the mainstream of
debate over the future of U.S. Chinese relations.”—Foreign Affairs
“The Hundred-Year Marathon looks at the critical issues of who is in fact making policy in the Chinese capital and, as a result, it will be read, analyzed and debated for years. Think of Pillsbury as our time’s Paul Revere.”—Gordon Chang, The National Interest
“This is a highly engaging and thought-provoking read. It does what few books do well, and that is to mix scholarship, policy, and memoir-style writing in an accessible but still intellectually rich fashion. . . . Pillsbury . . . draw[s] on his extensive knowledge of Chinese historical military writings and theory as well as his interactions with Chinese defectors and senior military officers to develop a compelling analytical defense of this thesis. . . . In the end, whether you agree with Pillsbury or not, the book is well worth a careful read.”—Elizabeth Economy, Council on Foreign Relations
“Despite dealing with a weighty subject, Pillsbury says everything that he wants to say . . . [in] this highly readable book. It deserves to be widely read and debated.”—The Christian Science Monitor
“Pillsbury’s scholarship is buttressed by an eye-popping amount of declassified material . . . Pillsbury’s key claim [is] that China . . . is methodically undertaking a ‘hundred-year marathon’ strategy to displace the United States as the global hegemon . . . The time is ripe to examine the trajectory of American relations with the world’s second-largest economy [and] the marathon is hardly over.”—The Weekly Standard
“Following the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war, Americans agonized over ‘Who lost China?’ If we do not recognize the Chinese party-state for the predatory animal that it is, in 20 years the question we will be asking ourselves is ‘Who lost the world?’ The answer will be, ‘We did.’”—The Washington Times
“A presentation of China’s hidden agenda grounded in the author’s longtime work at the U.S. Defense Department . . . Fodder for concerned thought.”—Kirkus Reviews
Reviews from Goodreads
BOOK EXCERPTS
Read an Excerpt
1
THE CHINA DREAM
"There cannot be two suns in the sky, nor two emperors on the earth."
-Confucius
As President Xi Jinping took office in March 2013, China watchers in America did not yet know what to make of...
About the author
Michael Pillsbury
