RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Michael, having read your book The Hundred-Year Marathon, which I greatly enjoyed, the question I want to start with is: What was the moment or the event that caused you to really rethink some of your most basic assumptions about China? You’re an especially interesting thinker on this topic because you’re someone who has made an intellectual journey. You started at one place and you’ve ended up somewhere very different. Why did that happen?
MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Well, there was no specific single moment. In fact, around the Tiananmen incident in 1989, I started to have doubts about the path we were on. But like many others in our government who were working on China, our, in retrospect, naive gullibility would continue. We would think, yes, this has been a human rights disaster, it’s a setback for reform, but somehow it’s really being carried out by older men in their nineties who will certainly pass away. The young reformers will take over and undo all this damage. That was my thinking into the ’90s.
Looking back, President George H. W. Bush’s decision to not fund the exiles who had left Beijing and gone to France — who had formed an exile government, elected a leader, and had a platform to bring democracy and free market to China — is a really painful memory for me. Because I was sent over to interview them in Paris and to see about the nature of the election.
But then we acted that way again in 1995 in the two aircraft carrier incidents, where another quite pro-China person like myself was the Secretary of Defense, Bill Perry. He was as shocked as I was that the Chinese would fire two long-range missiles over Taiwan, which, if something had gone wrong, would’ve killed many people down below. We sent two aircraft carriers to show our concern and that didn’t really seem to calm down the situation.
You would think we’d all wake up and see we were dealing with a very different kind of China. But at that point we were told by the Chinese: “Well, it’s your fault. You are encouraging this election in Taiwan for president, the first one. So, you’ve really started this.” And there was some truth to that. We had encouraged an election in Taiwan. So once again, everybody, including me, began to fall back on, “Well, the reformers are in their nineties, you know, surely this is going to be a thing of the past.” But each one of these passing incidents — I’m describing to you just two; there were actually six — would give me and others more concern, but we would always soothe ourselves by thinking “this is just a thing that will pass.” We were so wrong.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: You’ve spent your life really studying China. Why do you think that this promise that we had all hoped for — that economic liberalization would lead to political liberalization — came to a crashing halt in the last ten years? Is it all about the specific leadership, or are there other dynamics in play in Chinese society that have allowed this to happen?
MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Well, it’s both, because it’s both the dynamics inside the leadership and that the influence of the hawks in China was concealed from outsiders. They were not like Steve Bannon going on television to give his views. The hawks were very powerful, but they were largely unknown to us, and they were Chinese generals and intelligence executives whom I had dealt with a lot. They concealed their views. So there was a certain amount of self-deception going on; we wanted so badly to believe everything was going to work out with China that their silence on their hawkish views let us deceive ourselves even further.
I can give you a vivid example. The Chinese military have translated my book into Chinese, and they’ve classified it. It’s secret — only party members and military officers can buy it. So I asked a general whom I’ve seen again recently, “What’s wrong?” and he said “Well, you’re accusing us of deceiving America. But we never said we’re going to have a multi-party democracy and a free market. We were just silent when you said that.” And yes, that’s true. If I go back over my notes, there’s never a time when a Chinese hawk said to me, “Dr. Pillsbury, I swear we’re going to have the New Hampshire primary system to elect our president some day.” Never.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I want to go back to your analysis that this Chinese stance of cloaking in deception goes back for millennia to the Warring States period. In other words, part of this is cultural, it’s not just ideological.
MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Yes, but our misreading of this deception is also because of the way people like me are taught about China in graduate school. I got a Ph.D. from Columbia University focusing on Chinese politics. But I was not taught about the Warring States period. I was not taught about the importance of deception. I learned that from the Chinese themselves. They have their own internal textbooks about how to conduct foreign relations and how to do military strategy. I and others got hold of those books very late in the game and then we began to realize: “Oh my God. They’re saying deception is the most important tool to use with a superior power, until the point where you can surpass it.”
And the Chinese have this wonderful proverb that many people who read the book pick up on — “Don’t ask the weight of the cauldrons.” It comes from a story from the Warring States period, in which a country leader who wants to take over the empire accidently asks the grandson of the emperor, “How heavy are those cauldrons in the imperial palace?” Most Chinese proverbs are very vivid, and the sign of a civilized person is for you to know these proverbs.
So, don’t ask the weight of the cauldrons. Some people say this is what Xi Jinping has done now. He’s revealed his hand too soon. He’s under criticism for provoking the trade fight with President Trump and for the South China Sea militarization that he promised Obama they wouldn’t do. So he’s become more arrogant than a Chinese leader should be and he’s under criticism.
By the way, I found this in the 2011 Munk Debates book Does the 21st Century Belong to China?, in which Niall Ferguson is telling you that China has become arrogant and is behaving in ways that they’ll come to regret.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: I’m sure you’ve confronted critics who would say: “Look, to ascribe to the Chinese some kind of cultural tendency toward deception is to rhetorically back our way into the Yellow Peril. To see these people somehow as other from us, incapable of seeing the world as we see it.”
MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Absolutely, it’s “How could I be so stupid or racist to think that only the Chinese practise deception.” Actually those Chinese strategy textbooks I mentioned often compare Western deception techniques and give enormous praise to the amount of deception Westerners have used. One example is the Normandy landing. I actually had not known that we and the British and the Canadians bombed Calais a lot. Our pilots were killed, our planes were shot down, and it was all for a deception that the invasion would come through Calais, which is closer to Britain than Normandy is. So, the Chinese praised this. They say this is how World War II was won.
There’s another famous deception where the British and Americans got a corpse and let it float out of a submarine ashore in Spain. The Nazis look at him and go, “Wow, he’s got a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist.” They open it up. The briefcase has got metro tickets, opera tickets, and a war plan of when the Americans are going to invade France in the south. It’s totally false, totally concocted back in London by Eisenhower and Churchill. And it works. The Chinese love this. So, I don’t think this focus on deception and how it works sometimes is racist. I don’t think I’m “othering” the Chinese. The textbooks are very clear that deception only works if you’re trusted. Your target has got to believe you’re not a deceptive kind of person.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: Final question, and it’s about a phrase that you know well: the Thucydides Trap. This is a reference to Thucydides, the historian of Ancient Greece, who posited that the rise of Athens so threatened Sparta that it made war inevitable. And if you look over the last five hundred years for analogues to the conflict between Sparta and Athens, you see roughly sixteen or so examples of these kind of rivalries, and roughly 75 percent of those examples led to war. Are we at real risk here of seeing the United States and China fall into the Thucydides Trap?
MICHAEL PILLSBURY: I would agree with the last chapter in Henry Kissinger’s book On China. He is worried about a war on what he calls a World War I scale. That means the kind of war with millions dead on both sides. I think there’s another possibility, which is an accidental war. We’ve got some Chinese hawks in the past few months saying, “The next time the Americans come through Chinese waters, we Chinese should send a ship to either sink them or attack them.” Maybe this is just a couple of crazy hawks, but I happen to know them both and I think they have some influence inside the Chinese government. So an inadvertent, accidental war is one possibility.
As for a major World War I type of conflict happening, Kissinger is very clear. He explains that the way this could happen is if hawks in either Beijing or Washington take control of the government — I think he means through elections in the case of Washington — which will move us down the path toward war.
So no, I wouldn’t say this is impossible. As recently as fifteen years ago, we had an informal taboo that no U.S. military journal — army, navy, air force, marine corps — could have articles about war with China. It was a forbidden topic partly because it’s provocative, and partly because the chances were so low. Now, in the past three years, all of our journals have had many articles on how to win a war with China — new technology, new deployments, better intelligence.
On the Chinese side, officials used to conceal from me that they ever thought about a war with America; that was all Korean War and it had never happened again after. That stopped about five years ago. They now refer quite openly to the types of wars that could break out, including as a result of our supporting another power. If we’d backed India two years ago in the border dispute involving Bhutan, the Chinese claim they would have tried to punish us militarily. So when both militaries are talking openly about how to win a war with each other and both are running military exercises involving the other country, it’s got to be seen as at least mildly dangerous.
I don’t agree with the political scientist Graham Allison’s concept of the Thucydides Trap. The Chinese do agree with him, which is bad for Graham. Because the concept says that we are irrationally afraid of China and that will lead to war. But most people who are concerned about China say that we’ve got to head off war. We’ve got to increase the chances of reform in China. The dream hasn’t been given up by me or others. So there are two dangers with the so-called Thucydides Trap. One, war looks like it’s inevitable; and, two, the American and Western side’s position has been based on wrong emotions. Somehow, we’re irrationally afraid of poor little China, and this is going to cause war. I can’t agree with that concept.
RUDYARD GRIFFITHS: As a student of China, you would understand the extent to which they would bridle at the idea that we’re going to instill our values in them. I mean, this is a country that suffered the consequences of the Opium Wars. That seems the height of Western arrogance.
MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Yes. It’s very shrewd of you to point that out. I think it’s why Xi Jinping became the head of the Chinese Communist Party in 2012 and president of China in 2013. He was not selected by previous leaders, as had been their system before. Xi Jinping had to defeat a relatively hawkish candidate named Bo Xilai, who’s now in jail for life. He did that, I believe, by making an appeal to the hawks. His platform contained the exact sentiment you just expressed: that we can’t stand for this, that we’ve got to come out more in the open, that China has to stand up; that we can’t have these Westerners imposing their values, which is rock ‘n’ roll — he characterizes Western values in a way you might find inaccurate.
So, he was chosen and now he’s surrounded himself with hawks. And we were lucky that the main negotiator in Washington for the first ten rounds of the current talks is a reformer, an economist who’s written reform articles. But that’s very rare these days, as most reformers have been put in prison.