July 28, 2020
Dear Friends and Family,
As the introduction states, China has two long term goals:
This past week we heard significant dialogue about China, their ambitions, and U.S. political posturing to combat them. Specifically:
Several factors seemingly brought this significant foreign policy change relative to China to a head:
Welcome to segment one of our new series. Segment one focuses on two things: (1) the ambitions and goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and (2) if war breaks out (or perhaps better phased – conflicts leading up to a more typical military outbreak) the nature of the new type of weapons that will be used. The excerpts are drawn from two books: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury and Unrestricted Warfare by Col. Qiao Liang and Col. Wang Xiangsui. Pillsbury has served in presidential administrations from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama and is a leading expert to the government on China. The two colonels are both members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China.
Interestingly, the publishing date for Pillsbury’s book is 2013 and the publishing date for the PLA book is 1999. So, both have been around awhile. As you read the excerpts from Unrestricted Warfare think about these three factors in the above listing.
If you desire more information, click on the PDF attachment to access an extended version of the excerpts.
Next:
Segment two will provide additional information on the CCP’s intent plus excerpts from the Trump Administration’s, U.S. Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China which was presented to Congress on May 20, 2020.
Happy Learning,
Harley
Dear Friends and Family,
As the introduction states, China has two long term goals:
- Becoming the world’s technology leader by 2025, and
- Replacing the United States as the economic, military, and political leader and world’s only Superpower by 2049.
This past week we heard significant dialogue about China, their ambitions, and U.S. political posturing to combat them. Specifically:
- How for the past 40+ years the U.S.’s foreign policy was framed on the assumption that as China attained prosperity and participated in global trade their values and governance would move towards Western values of democracy and freedom. In last Thursday’s (7/23) speech Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, said the U.S. no longer believes this to be the case and we are not going to “turn our other cheek” to China as we have been doing; we have an imbalanced relationship with them – in their favor – and that is going to change.
- That we are going to hold the Chinese Communist Party accountable for the theft of our intellectual property, for the COVID-19 coverup, and will recognize them as an adversary.
- That the U.S. is going to take a leadership role in developing a Global Alliance against China’s aggression with an approach to Beijing of “Distrust and Verify.”
- Last Friday, 7/24, China’s embassy in Houston, Texas was closed by the U.S. Government.
Several factors seemingly brought this significant foreign policy change relative to China to a head:
- The Chinese Communist Party’s recent clampdown on Hong Kong, violating their treaty with Great Britain.
- A deadly border skirmish with India.
- China’s military buildup in the South China Sea.
- Australia’s reformatting their military in preparation of a potential attack by China.
- China’s coverup from the world of the initial stages of COVID-19 within their country.
- The documented human rights violations in the “brainwashing” and imprisonment of one to three million Uighers (a 10 million Islamic population within China) in “concentration camps” which the Chinese refer to as “re-education boarding schools.”
- FBI Director Wray’s testimony that the FBI currently has 5,000 open counter espionage cases with over half being from China and the opening of a new case every 10 hours on average.
- China’s sponsoring criminal hackers targeting bio-tech firms around the world to gain technical knowledge on a coronavirus vaccine and therapies for their own political purposes.
Welcome to segment one of our new series. Segment one focuses on two things: (1) the ambitions and goals of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and (2) if war breaks out (or perhaps better phased – conflicts leading up to a more typical military outbreak) the nature of the new type of weapons that will be used. The excerpts are drawn from two books: The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury and Unrestricted Warfare by Col. Qiao Liang and Col. Wang Xiangsui. Pillsbury has served in presidential administrations from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama and is a leading expert to the government on China. The two colonels are both members of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China.
Interestingly, the publishing date for Pillsbury’s book is 2013 and the publishing date for the PLA book is 1999. So, both have been around awhile. As you read the excerpts from Unrestricted Warfare think about these three factors in the above listing.
- The COVID – 19 pandemic
- The counter espionage activity on the part of the Chinese
- The criminal hacking by the Chinese of U.S. and other countries big-bio-tech firms
If you desire more information, click on the PDF attachment to access an extended version of the excerpts.
Next:
Segment two will provide additional information on the CCP’s intent plus excerpts from the Trump Administration’s, U.S. Strategic Approach to the People’s Republic of China which was presented to Congress on May 20, 2020.
Happy Learning,
Harley
CHINA SERIES – SEGMENT 1
CHINA’S HUNDRED-YEAR MARATHON – EXCERPTS
CHINA’S PLAN: To avenge a century of humiliation and replace the United States as the economic, military, and political leader of the world by 2049 (the 100th anniversary of the Communist Revolution). Chinese leaders developed a plan known as “the Hundred-Year Marathon.” It is a plan that has been implemented by the Communist Party leadership from the beginning of its relations with the U.S. The goal is to avenge or “wipe clean” past humiliations. Then China will set up a world order that will be fair to China, a world without American global supremacy. The hawks assess that China can only succeed in this project through deception or at least by denial of any frightening plans. They merely want to restore China to its former global position of 300 years ago, when it commanded roughly a third of the world economy. That apparently means becoming at least twice as strong as the U.S. by 2049.
U.S. WISHFUL THINKING: Americans have been wrong about China again and again, sometimes with profound consequences. Many of us who study China have been taught to view the country as a helpless victim of Western imperialists – a notion that China’s leaders not only believe, but also actively encourage. This perspective – the desire to help China at all costs, the almost willful blindness to any actions that undercut our views of Chinese goodwill and victimhood – has colored the U.S. government’s approach to dealing with China. It has affected the advice that China experts offer to U.S. presidents and other leaders. We believed 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 global dominance. We underestimated the influence of China’s hawks. Every one of the assumptions behind that belief was wrong – dangerously so.
CHINA’S STRATEGY: President Xi Jinping took office in March 2013. Xi soon demonstrated that he had a dream – one of a resurgent China that would reclaim its rightful place atop the global hierarchy. This has been a Communist Party ambition since Mao took power in 1949, the date commonly understood by China’s leaders as the beginning of the Hundred-Year Marathon. The nine principal elements of Chinese strategy include the following:
Source: The Hundred-Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury
UNRESTICTED WARFARE: From Unrestricted Warfare (1999) by Col. Qiao and Col. Wang. The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden. From this point on, war will no longer be what it was originally. If in the days to come mankind has no choice but to engage in war, it can no longer be carried our in the ways with which we are familiar. The two sentences, “fight the fight that fit one’s weapons” and “build the weapons to fit the fight” show the clear demarcation line between traditional warfare and future warfare, as well as pointing out the relationship between weapons and tactics in the two kinds of war. With weapons coming first, followed by tactics, the evolution of weapons has a decisive constraining effect on the evolution of tactics.
That is to say that there is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon, and this requires that our understanding of weapons must have an awareness that breaks through all boundaries. A single man-made stock-market crash, a single computer virus invasion, or a single rumor or scandal that results in aa fluctuation in the enemy country’s exchange rates, all can be included in the ranks of new-concept weapons. With regard to the flood of new-concept weapons, technology is no longer the main factor, and the true underlying factor is a new concept regarding weapons. The appearance of new-concept weapons will definitely elevate future warfare to a level which is hard for the common people – or even military men – to imagine. Just think, if it’s even possible to start a war in a computer room or a stock exchange that will send an enemy country to its doom, then is there non-battlespace anywhere? If the young lad setting out with his order should ask today, “Where is the battlefield? The answer would be: “Everywhere.” In the information age, the influence exerted by a nuclear bomb is perhaps less than the influence exerted by a hacker.
Financial Warfare: Financial war is a form of non-military warfare which is just as terribly destructive as a bloody war, but in which no blood is actually shed.
Terrorist Warfare: What really strikes terror into people’s hearts is the rendezvous of terrorists with various types of new, high technologies that possibly will evolve into new superweapons. We already have a hint of what the future may hold – a hint that may well cause concern. When Aum Shinrikyo followers discharged “Sarin” poison gas in a Tokyo subway, the casualties resulting from the poison gas accounted for just a small portion of the terror. This affair put people on notice that modern biochemical technology had already forged a lethal weapon for those terrorists who would try to carry out the mass destruction of humanity. The “Falange Armed Forces” group in Italy is a completely different class of high-tech terrorist organization. Its goals are explicit and the means that it employs are extraordinary. It specializes in breaking into computer networks of banks and news organizations, stealing stored data, deleting programs and disseminating disinformation.
Ecological Warfare: Ecological war refers to a new type of non-military warfare in which modern technology is employed to influence the natural state of rivers, oceans, the crust of the earth, the polar sheets, the air circulating in the atmosphere, and the ozone layer.
Grand Warfare Method: A “grand warfare method’ combines all of the dimensions and methods in the two major areas of military and non-military affairs so as to carry out warfare, This is opposite of the formula for warfare methods brought forth in past wars.
America’s non-military Warfare Readiness: They affirm that military means are the final means for resolving future conflicts, and the disputes between all nations will ultimately end up with two large armies meeting on the battlefield. This has accelerated the occurrence of non-military wars. The hacker wars, financial wars, and computer virus wars which will dominate the future, are also the present various types of “new concept wars” to which it is difficult to fix a name to. It is not the case that American military circles have not noticed this advantage of eliminating the enemy against military and non-military threats, and yet they have pushed the resolution of the latter problem on to the politicians and Central Intelligence Agency so that they have retreated from the existing all-dimensional wars, non-combatant military operation, and other new views.
Yet, what is surprising is that such a large nation unexpectedly does not have a unified strategy and command structure to deal with the threat. What makes one even more so wonder whether to laugh or cry is that unexpectedly they have 49 departments and offices responsible for anti-terrorist activities, but there is very little coordination and cooperation among them. Other nations are not that much better than the U.S. in this area.
When there is a computer then there is a computer virus, and when there is currency there is monetary speculation, and the battlefield is next to you and the enemy is on the network. Only there is no smell of gunpowder or the odor of blood. However, it is war as before, because it accords with the definition of modern warfare: forcing the enemy to satisfy one’s own interests. The new threats require new national security views, and new security views then necessitate soldiers who first expand their fields of vision prior to expanding their victories. When carrying out war with these people, there is no declaration of war, no fixed battlefield, no face-to-face fighting and killing, and in the majority of situation, there will be no gunpowder smoke, gun fire, and spilling of blood. However, the destruction and injuries encountered by the international community are in no way less than those of a military war.
Traditional vs. New Warfare: Supposing a war broke out between two developed nations. The attacking side would generally employ the modes of great depth, wide front, high strength, and three-dimensionality to launch a campaign assault against the enemy. Their method does not go beyond satellite reconnaissance, electronic countermeasures, large-scale air attacks plus precision attacks, ground outflanking, amphibious landings, air drops behind enemy lines. However, by using the combination method, a completely different scenario and game can occur: if the attacking side secretly musters large amounts of capital without the enemy nation being aware of this at all and launches a sneak attack against its financial markets, then after causing a financial crisis, buries a computer virus and hacker detachment in the opponent’s computer system in advance, while at the same time carrying out a network attack against the enemy so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network, and mass media network are completely paralyzed, this will cause the enemy nation to fall into a social panic, street riots, and a political crisis.
Source: Unrestricted Warfare (1999) by Col. Qiao Liang and Col. Wang Xiangsui of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
WARNING SHOTS:
1). Many foreign journalists in China assume that everything they say and write, their phone calls, and their e-mails are monitored by the Chinese government. The goal is to disrupt the plans of your rival. To prevent him from seeing the true geopolitical situation.
2). In December 2009, President Obama traveled to Copenhagen, where representatives from 192 countries had gathered to ratify new global policies on climate change. The summit was marked by a significant change in the public tone of Chinese officials. They demonstrated uncharacteristic rudeness, interrupting Western diplomats on several occasions and providing little constructive input to the discussions. China surprised observers by making a side agreement with other developing nations that blocked the, hoped for, commitments from being included in the climate change draft agreement. This effectively torpedoed the goals of the conference.
Taiwan has long been a source of contention between the U.S. and China, but the new assertiveness with which the People’s Republic protested long-standing arms sales to the island in late January 2010 caused wholesale rethinking U.S. – Taiwan relations and cast doubts on future arms sales. China called the deal “a gross intervention into China’s internal affairs,” a far more combative response than Beijing’s past practice. China imposed sanctions against some of the U.S. companies that had sold the material to Taiwan. Bowing to this pressure, the administration decided not to make the next proposed U.S. arms sale of advanced F-16 aircraft to Taiwan, prompting criticism from members of Congress, who accused the administration of standing up to China.
3). The fictional year was 2030, and the officer who spoke for the secretary of defense was on a team playing a war game at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. I was a participant. My “Red Team” represented China. I’d been invited to think like a Chinese military leader, to be creative, and to channel the Chinese asymmetric approaches I’d been investigating.
For the first time in history of the Pentagon sanctioned military simulations, the U.S. had lost a war game. To win, I had employed tactics derived from my evolving understanding of Chinese strategy. Twenty similar war games were conducted by the Pentagon over the next few years. Whenever the China team used conventional tactics and strategies, America won – decisively. However, in every case where China employed asymmetric methods, China was the victor.
4). It wasn’t until a trip to Beijing in the fall of 2013 that I realized how wrong we had been and how quickly China has mobilized to take advantage of America’s decline, as perceived by Beijing. I realized that a new scenario was emerging: China would become more assertive with each improvement in the balance of power relative to the U.S. according to Beijing’s calculations. Looking forward, the U.S. should expect a new phase of increased Chinese assertiveness. Beijing will push diplomatic demands that seem impracticable or inconceivable today – and other nations will yield to China’s pressure. Unfortunately, America has shown little awareness of the challenge and, in any event, even less of an appetite to confront it.
A CHINA WORLD ORDER IN 2049: By 2050, China’s economy will be much larger that America’s – perhaps three times larger, according to some projections – and the world could then be a unipolar one, with China as the global leader. If China’s government retains its current priorities, continues its same strategies, and clings to the values, a world shaped in China’s image will be very different from the world we know today. What is at stake if we fail to bolster the real reformers is the world described below.
China’s Values Will Replace American Values: For China, personal rights in the American sense do not exist. The society for the Chinese Communist Party has helped to shape its collectivism. For decades, China’s government has denied individual rights to its own people. Chinese officials could use cyberattacks to harass anyone whose speech they disapprove of; many people outside of China, from Asia to North America, would consequently have to watch what they say and wonder whether they’ll be punished.
China Will “Harmonize” Dissent on the Internet: One of China’s weapons in its war on free speech is censorship of the Internet.
China Will Continue to Oppose Democratization: Chinese officials prefer a world with more autocracies and fewer democracies. As China’s power continues to grow, its ability to protect dictatorial, pro-China governments and to undermine representative governments will likely grow dramatically.
China Will Form Alliances with America’s Adversaries: The hard truth is that China’s leaders see America as a rival – one that they plan on winning.
China’s Growth Strategy Entails Significant Pollution and Contamination: The human cost of China’s air and water pollution can be seen first-hand in the number of “cancer villages” that have appeared near Chinese factories. Those factories dump waste, toxic chemicals, and other questionable materials into rivers, killing wildlife, ruining the water, causing birth defects, and even leading to death. Only 40% of Chinese is in line with international norms.
Cheaters Win – China Will Unleash the National Champions: When it comes to trade and growth, America is losing to China, and the reason is simple: China cheats.
China Will Increasingly Undermine the U.S. and the World Trade Organization (WTO): If China succeeds in weakening the United Nations and the WTO, it will be in keeping with its goal of creating a new world order by first delegitimizing the old one.
China Will Proliferate Weapons for Profit: Rather than slowing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and increasingly powerful China will accelerate it. Rather than isolating rogue nations, China will empower them. And rather than cooperating with the U.S. and its allies, China will undermine and weaken them at every opportunity, especially when it comes to its own national security.
If the China dream becomes reality in 2049, the Sinocentric world will nurture autocracies; many websites will be filled with rewritten history defaming the West and praising China; and pollution will contaminate the air in more countries, as developing nations adopt the Chinese model of “grow now, and deal with the environment later.” Chinese state-owned monopolies and Chinese controlled economic alliances will dominate the global marketplace, and one of the world’s mightiest military alliance may be controlled by Beijing. This is hardly a future to look forward to. Yet, in effect, many who have not made the effort to understand the long-term consequences of Chinese strategy are doing just that. Pressuring China to change has become less and less feasible. Unfortunately, our leverage has declines even as a few have begun to wake up.
Source: The Hundred-Year Marathon, China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
CHINA’S HUNDRED-YEAR MARATHON – EXCERPTS
CHINA’S PLAN: To avenge a century of humiliation and replace the United States as the economic, military, and political leader of the world by 2049 (the 100th anniversary of the Communist Revolution). Chinese leaders developed a plan known as “the Hundred-Year Marathon.” It is a plan that has been implemented by the Communist Party leadership from the beginning of its relations with the U.S. The goal is to avenge or “wipe clean” past humiliations. Then China will set up a world order that will be fair to China, a world without American global supremacy. The hawks assess that China can only succeed in this project through deception or at least by denial of any frightening plans. They merely want to restore China to its former global position of 300 years ago, when it commanded roughly a third of the world economy. That apparently means becoming at least twice as strong as the U.S. by 2049.
U.S. WISHFUL THINKING: Americans have been wrong about China again and again, sometimes with profound consequences. Many of us who study China have been taught to view the country as a helpless victim of Western imperialists – a notion that China’s leaders not only believe, but also actively encourage. This perspective – the desire to help China at all costs, the almost willful blindness to any actions that undercut our views of Chinese goodwill and victimhood – has colored the U.S. government’s approach to dealing with China. It has affected the advice that China experts offer to U.S. presidents and other leaders. We believed 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 global dominance. We underestimated the influence of China’s hawks. Every one of the assumptions behind that belief was wrong – dangerously so.
CHINA’S STRATEGY: President Xi Jinping took office in March 2013. Xi soon demonstrated that he had a dream – one of a resurgent China that would reclaim its rightful place atop the global hierarchy. This has been a Communist Party ambition since Mao took power in 1949, the date commonly understood by China’s leaders as the beginning of the Hundred-Year Marathon. The nine principal elements of Chinese strategy include the following:
- Induce complacency to avoid alerting your opponent.
- Manipulate your opponent’s advisers.
- Be patient – for decades, or longer – to achieve victory.
- Steal your opponent’s ideas and technology for strategic purposes.
- Military might is not the critical factor for winning a long-term competition.
- Recognize that the hegemon will take extreme, even reckless action to retain its dominant position.
- Never lose sight of shi. 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.
- Establish and employ metrics for measuring your status relative to other potential challengers.
- Always be vigilant to avoid being encircled or deceived by others.
Source: The Hundred-Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury
UNRESTICTED WARFARE: From Unrestricted Warfare (1999) by Col. Qiao and Col. Wang. The first rule of unrestricted warfare is that there are no rules, with nothing forbidden. From this point on, war will no longer be what it was originally. If in the days to come mankind has no choice but to engage in war, it can no longer be carried our in the ways with which we are familiar. The two sentences, “fight the fight that fit one’s weapons” and “build the weapons to fit the fight” show the clear demarcation line between traditional warfare and future warfare, as well as pointing out the relationship between weapons and tactics in the two kinds of war. With weapons coming first, followed by tactics, the evolution of weapons has a decisive constraining effect on the evolution of tactics.
That is to say that there is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon, and this requires that our understanding of weapons must have an awareness that breaks through all boundaries. A single man-made stock-market crash, a single computer virus invasion, or a single rumor or scandal that results in aa fluctuation in the enemy country’s exchange rates, all can be included in the ranks of new-concept weapons. With regard to the flood of new-concept weapons, technology is no longer the main factor, and the true underlying factor is a new concept regarding weapons. The appearance of new-concept weapons will definitely elevate future warfare to a level which is hard for the common people – or even military men – to imagine. Just think, if it’s even possible to start a war in a computer room or a stock exchange that will send an enemy country to its doom, then is there non-battlespace anywhere? If the young lad setting out with his order should ask today, “Where is the battlefield? The answer would be: “Everywhere.” In the information age, the influence exerted by a nuclear bomb is perhaps less than the influence exerted by a hacker.
Financial Warfare: Financial war is a form of non-military warfare which is just as terribly destructive as a bloody war, but in which no blood is actually shed.
Terrorist Warfare: What really strikes terror into people’s hearts is the rendezvous of terrorists with various types of new, high technologies that possibly will evolve into new superweapons. We already have a hint of what the future may hold – a hint that may well cause concern. When Aum Shinrikyo followers discharged “Sarin” poison gas in a Tokyo subway, the casualties resulting from the poison gas accounted for just a small portion of the terror. This affair put people on notice that modern biochemical technology had already forged a lethal weapon for those terrorists who would try to carry out the mass destruction of humanity. The “Falange Armed Forces” group in Italy is a completely different class of high-tech terrorist organization. Its goals are explicit and the means that it employs are extraordinary. It specializes in breaking into computer networks of banks and news organizations, stealing stored data, deleting programs and disseminating disinformation.
Ecological Warfare: Ecological war refers to a new type of non-military warfare in which modern technology is employed to influence the natural state of rivers, oceans, the crust of the earth, the polar sheets, the air circulating in the atmosphere, and the ozone layer.
Grand Warfare Method: A “grand warfare method’ combines all of the dimensions and methods in the two major areas of military and non-military affairs so as to carry out warfare, This is opposite of the formula for warfare methods brought forth in past wars.
America’s non-military Warfare Readiness: They affirm that military means are the final means for resolving future conflicts, and the disputes between all nations will ultimately end up with two large armies meeting on the battlefield. This has accelerated the occurrence of non-military wars. The hacker wars, financial wars, and computer virus wars which will dominate the future, are also the present various types of “new concept wars” to which it is difficult to fix a name to. It is not the case that American military circles have not noticed this advantage of eliminating the enemy against military and non-military threats, and yet they have pushed the resolution of the latter problem on to the politicians and Central Intelligence Agency so that they have retreated from the existing all-dimensional wars, non-combatant military operation, and other new views.
Yet, what is surprising is that such a large nation unexpectedly does not have a unified strategy and command structure to deal with the threat. What makes one even more so wonder whether to laugh or cry is that unexpectedly they have 49 departments and offices responsible for anti-terrorist activities, but there is very little coordination and cooperation among them. Other nations are not that much better than the U.S. in this area.
When there is a computer then there is a computer virus, and when there is currency there is monetary speculation, and the battlefield is next to you and the enemy is on the network. Only there is no smell of gunpowder or the odor of blood. However, it is war as before, because it accords with the definition of modern warfare: forcing the enemy to satisfy one’s own interests. The new threats require new national security views, and new security views then necessitate soldiers who first expand their fields of vision prior to expanding their victories. When carrying out war with these people, there is no declaration of war, no fixed battlefield, no face-to-face fighting and killing, and in the majority of situation, there will be no gunpowder smoke, gun fire, and spilling of blood. However, the destruction and injuries encountered by the international community are in no way less than those of a military war.
Traditional vs. New Warfare: Supposing a war broke out between two developed nations. The attacking side would generally employ the modes of great depth, wide front, high strength, and three-dimensionality to launch a campaign assault against the enemy. Their method does not go beyond satellite reconnaissance, electronic countermeasures, large-scale air attacks plus precision attacks, ground outflanking, amphibious landings, air drops behind enemy lines. However, by using the combination method, a completely different scenario and game can occur: if the attacking side secretly musters large amounts of capital without the enemy nation being aware of this at all and launches a sneak attack against its financial markets, then after causing a financial crisis, buries a computer virus and hacker detachment in the opponent’s computer system in advance, while at the same time carrying out a network attack against the enemy so that the civilian electricity network, traffic dispatching network, financial transaction network, telephone communications network, and mass media network are completely paralyzed, this will cause the enemy nation to fall into a social panic, street riots, and a political crisis.
Source: Unrestricted Warfare (1999) by Col. Qiao Liang and Col. Wang Xiangsui of China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA)
WARNING SHOTS:
1). Many foreign journalists in China assume that everything they say and write, their phone calls, and their e-mails are monitored by the Chinese government. The goal is to disrupt the plans of your rival. To prevent him from seeing the true geopolitical situation.
2). In December 2009, President Obama traveled to Copenhagen, where representatives from 192 countries had gathered to ratify new global policies on climate change. The summit was marked by a significant change in the public tone of Chinese officials. They demonstrated uncharacteristic rudeness, interrupting Western diplomats on several occasions and providing little constructive input to the discussions. China surprised observers by making a side agreement with other developing nations that blocked the, hoped for, commitments from being included in the climate change draft agreement. This effectively torpedoed the goals of the conference.
Taiwan has long been a source of contention between the U.S. and China, but the new assertiveness with which the People’s Republic protested long-standing arms sales to the island in late January 2010 caused wholesale rethinking U.S. – Taiwan relations and cast doubts on future arms sales. China called the deal “a gross intervention into China’s internal affairs,” a far more combative response than Beijing’s past practice. China imposed sanctions against some of the U.S. companies that had sold the material to Taiwan. Bowing to this pressure, the administration decided not to make the next proposed U.S. arms sale of advanced F-16 aircraft to Taiwan, prompting criticism from members of Congress, who accused the administration of standing up to China.
3). The fictional year was 2030, and the officer who spoke for the secretary of defense was on a team playing a war game at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island. I was a participant. My “Red Team” represented China. I’d been invited to think like a Chinese military leader, to be creative, and to channel the Chinese asymmetric approaches I’d been investigating.
For the first time in history of the Pentagon sanctioned military simulations, the U.S. had lost a war game. To win, I had employed tactics derived from my evolving understanding of Chinese strategy. Twenty similar war games were conducted by the Pentagon over the next few years. Whenever the China team used conventional tactics and strategies, America won – decisively. However, in every case where China employed asymmetric methods, China was the victor.
4). It wasn’t until a trip to Beijing in the fall of 2013 that I realized how wrong we had been and how quickly China has mobilized to take advantage of America’s decline, as perceived by Beijing. I realized that a new scenario was emerging: China would become more assertive with each improvement in the balance of power relative to the U.S. according to Beijing’s calculations. Looking forward, the U.S. should expect a new phase of increased Chinese assertiveness. Beijing will push diplomatic demands that seem impracticable or inconceivable today – and other nations will yield to China’s pressure. Unfortunately, America has shown little awareness of the challenge and, in any event, even less of an appetite to confront it.
A CHINA WORLD ORDER IN 2049: By 2050, China’s economy will be much larger that America’s – perhaps three times larger, according to some projections – and the world could then be a unipolar one, with China as the global leader. If China’s government retains its current priorities, continues its same strategies, and clings to the values, a world shaped in China’s image will be very different from the world we know today. What is at stake if we fail to bolster the real reformers is the world described below.
China’s Values Will Replace American Values: For China, personal rights in the American sense do not exist. The society for the Chinese Communist Party has helped to shape its collectivism. For decades, China’s government has denied individual rights to its own people. Chinese officials could use cyberattacks to harass anyone whose speech they disapprove of; many people outside of China, from Asia to North America, would consequently have to watch what they say and wonder whether they’ll be punished.
China Will “Harmonize” Dissent on the Internet: One of China’s weapons in its war on free speech is censorship of the Internet.
China Will Continue to Oppose Democratization: Chinese officials prefer a world with more autocracies and fewer democracies. As China’s power continues to grow, its ability to protect dictatorial, pro-China governments and to undermine representative governments will likely grow dramatically.
China Will Form Alliances with America’s Adversaries: The hard truth is that China’s leaders see America as a rival – one that they plan on winning.
China’s Growth Strategy Entails Significant Pollution and Contamination: The human cost of China’s air and water pollution can be seen first-hand in the number of “cancer villages” that have appeared near Chinese factories. Those factories dump waste, toxic chemicals, and other questionable materials into rivers, killing wildlife, ruining the water, causing birth defects, and even leading to death. Only 40% of Chinese is in line with international norms.
Cheaters Win – China Will Unleash the National Champions: When it comes to trade and growth, America is losing to China, and the reason is simple: China cheats.
China Will Increasingly Undermine the U.S. and the World Trade Organization (WTO): If China succeeds in weakening the United Nations and the WTO, it will be in keeping with its goal of creating a new world order by first delegitimizing the old one.
China Will Proliferate Weapons for Profit: Rather than slowing the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, and increasingly powerful China will accelerate it. Rather than isolating rogue nations, China will empower them. And rather than cooperating with the U.S. and its allies, China will undermine and weaken them at every opportunity, especially when it comes to its own national security.
If the China dream becomes reality in 2049, the Sinocentric world will nurture autocracies; many websites will be filled with rewritten history defaming the West and praising China; and pollution will contaminate the air in more countries, as developing nations adopt the Chinese model of “grow now, and deal with the environment later.” Chinese state-owned monopolies and Chinese controlled economic alliances will dominate the global marketplace, and one of the world’s mightiest military alliance may be controlled by Beijing. This is hardly a future to look forward to. Yet, in effect, many who have not made the effort to understand the long-term consequences of Chinese strategy are doing just that. Pressuring China to change has become less and less feasible. Unfortunately, our leverage has declines even as a few have begun to wake up.
Source: The Hundred-Year Marathon, China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower by Michael Pillsbury.
The unabbreviated version of the above can be found in the pdf document below.
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