10.13.16
by

How China thinks – Lessons for us

art-of-war

The article has excerpts from the book – The Hundred-Year Marathon

Hi. Sorry for the gap between posts. Have been quite busy recently. I was going through this recently published Michael Pillsbury’s non-fiction titled the The Hundred-Year Marathon. So thought of sharing a few great excerpts from the Chapter 2 of the book. The author has shared a few great insights into the Chinese way of strategizing and planning things for the future.

There cannot be two suns in the sky, nor two emperors on the earth.
-Confucius

Who is Michael Pillsbury?

He is an American defense policy adviser, former government official and author of books and reports on China. During the Reagan administration, Pillsbury was the Assistant Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Planning and responsible for implementation of the program of covert aid known as the Reagan Doctrine. In 1975–76, while an analyst at the RAND Corporation, Pillsbury published articles in Foreign Policy and International Security recommending that the United States establish intelligence and military ties with China. The proposal, publicly commended by Ronald Reagan, Henry Kissinger, and James Schlesinger, later became US policy during the Carter and Reagan administrations. In 1992, under President George H. W. Bush, Pillsbury was Special Assistant for Asian Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, reporting to Andrew W. Marshall, Director of Net Assessment. Pillsbury is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies.

Excerpts

In Chinese history, there is no 1492 or 1776. China’s rich history dates back more than three millennia. China cherishes no founding myth like the story of a promised land given to Abraham or a precise moment of creation like the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. Instead, China’s history is one of war and rivalries within fixed geographic boundaries—vast oceans to the east, forbidding deserts to the north, towering mountains to the west. Dynasties and rulers have come and gone, and in the Chinese way of thinking they will come and go for millennia to come. As Henry Kissinger has noted, “China’s sense of time beats to a different rhythm from America’s. When an American is asked to date a historical event, he refers to a specific day on the calendar; when a Chinese describes an event, he places it within a dynasty.

***

One clear trend beginning in the mid-1990s was an increase in the number of Chinese authors who began to draw lessons from the Warring States period. Major General Li Binyan was among the first. Thirty Chinese generals hosted a conference every few years about applying a Warring States classic, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and I was invited to present a paper at three of the sessions as a scholar from the Pentagon.

***

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.

***

Owing to pre-Communist Chinese civil-military traditions dating to about 1920, high-ranking Chinese military personnel are expected to play a significant role in civilian strategic planning. To get a sense of just how different this is from the American system, imagine that issues that are generally considered to properly fall under the purview of U.S. civilian leaders, such as family planning, taxation, and economic policy, were instead transferred to generals and admirals in the Pentagon. Imagine further that the United States lacked both a supreme court and an independent judiciary, and you get some sense of this tremendous disparity between the relatively narrow influence of our military leaders and the broader advisory role played by China’s top military leaders since 1949.

Modern China’s first foreign minister was a general. We now know, from Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, that the decision to pursue an opening with the United States came not from China’s civilian leaders, but instead from a committee of four Chinese generals. In 1979, a Chinese weapons designer developed China’s one-child policy. In 1980, metrics for measuring China’s progress in pursuing its Marathon strategy were developed by a military writer from the Academy of Military Sciences, the premier research institute of the People’s Liberation Army. One of the best-known books in China about grand strategy, fittingly titled On Grand Strategy, was written by an author from the Academy of Military Sciences. A Chinese general developed China’s strategy for managing its energy resources. China’s long-term military science and technology plan was developed in 1986 by a team of nationalist hawkish Chinese nuclear weapons scientists.

***

The proverbs and stories I read in these language textbooks formed the basis of how most Chinese perceive the world, and provided me a window into Chinese thinking, history, and worldviews. These were lessons I came to appreciate fully only over the course of many subsequent decades. The teachers separated Chinese tradition into two opposite patterns: the Confucian world of benevolence and sincerity, and the ruthless world of the hegemons of the Warring States. We memorized a well-known proverb intended to sum up Chinese history: wai ru, nei fa (on the outside, be benevolent; on the inside, be ruthless).

***

One of the most famous stories from the Warring States period begins with a tale of two neighboring kingdoms, one rising, one falling in relative power: Chu and Zhou. As the leader of Chu reviewed his troops with a member of the declining Zhou dynasty along their mutual border, he couldn’t resist asking the size and weight of the cauldrons in the Zhou royal palace. The purpose of the meeting was for the rising leader of Chu to pledge fealty and forswear any imperial designs, but when Chu asked the weight of the emperor’s cauldrons, the perceptive Zhou representative chided him. “Each time a dynasty loses the mandate of heaven, the cauldrons are moved,” was the reply. “The king of Zhou has the cauldrons. His ancestor hoped to rule for thirty generations, or seven hundred years, with the mandate of heaven. Although the virtue of Zhou has declined, heaven’s mandate has not yet changed. It is too soon to ask about the weight of the cauldrons.” By asking about the cauldrons, Chu had inadvertently revealed his intent to challenge Zhou.

The lesson is famous in China: “Never ask the weight of the emperor’s cauldrons.” In other words, don’t let the enemy know you’re a rival, until it is too late for him to stop you.

***

During the Warring States period, rising challengers overthrew many great powers. In each case, the successful rising power induced complacency in the old emperor by concealing any ambition to replace him. The worst thing a rising leader could do was to provoke confrontation with his more powerful rival before the point of maximum opportunity. Only in the final phase of a power bid, when the emperor was too weak to resist and had been abandoned by his former allies, did the rising challenger reveal his true aims.

As chronicled in Stratagems of the Warring States, some of the wisest rising challengers even persuaded the old emperor to unwittingly assist in the challenger’s ascendance. In those cases, the challenger often persuaded the emperor to punish advisers who were skeptical of the challenger’s intentions (“hawks”) and to promote advisers whom the challenger could manipulate into complacency and cooperation (“doves”).

***

Another lesson from the Warring States period is that success requires extreme patience. American businesses live by quarterly reports, U.S. politicians operate on short election cycles, and successful stock market strategies may be based on trading conducted in a single day. Yet the stories of the Warring States period’s rising challengers teach that victory is never achieved in a single day, week, or year—or even in a decade. Only long-term plans spanning hundreds of years led to victory. Consequently, it’s not uncommon for today’s Chinese leaders, who automatically serve two ten-year terms, to make plans that span generations and to set goals that will not be achieved for a half century or more.

***

Warring States literature and other folklore stories of Chinese cultural heroes have also stressed the importance of stealing ideas and technology from the opponent. Today, Chinese intelligence services routinely steal technology and competitive information, which they provide directly to Chinese corporate leaders. Many American officials assume that China’s predatory economic behavior in recent years—such as conducting industrial espionage or violating intellectual property rights—is part of a passing phase. To the contrary, it is one part of a much larger strategy inspired by stratagems distilled from the Warring States period.

***

Consider also the contrast between American and Chinese views about the optimum size of military forces. Many of America’s greatest military triumphs were achieved through large armies. Grant overwhelmed Lee with more men and more guns. On June 6, 1944, Dwight Eisenhower sent the largest armada in history to Normandy. Even in recent times, the so-called Powell Doctrine has advocated the necessity of a force far larger than the enemy’s.

In contrast, the Warring States period did not involve great military outlays. Nonviolent competition for several decades constituted the main form of struggle. A famous strategy was to deplete an adversary’s financial resources by tricking it into spending too much on its military. Two thousand years later, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the Chinese interpretation was that the Americans had intentionally bankrupted Moscow by tricking it into spending excessively on defense.

Instead of trying to match America plane for plane and ship for ship, China has invested heavily in asymmetric systems designed to get the biggest bang for the buck. The Chinese have pioneered antisatellite technology, developed the means to counter stealth bombers, invested heavily in cyber intrusion, and built missiles costing a few million dollars that can sink a $4 billion American aircraft carrier. The missile price was so low—and the capability so high—because the missile may have been based on stolen American technology.

Many Western analysts wonder why China hasn’t built more powerful military forces to protect itself and its sea-lanes. The answer is found in the lessons of the Warring States period: China doesn’t want to “ask the weight of the emperor’s cauldrons.” However, applying the axioms of the Warring States, China could decide to cast aside its self-imposed constraints on military spending in the final phases of a multi-decade competition—once it’s too late for America to stop them.

***

At the heart of Chinese strategy is shi, which is a difficult concept to explain to a Western audience. It cannot be directly translated into English, but Chinese linguists describe it as “the alignment of forces” or “propensity of things to happen,” which only a skilled strategist can exploit to ensure victory over a superior force. Similarly, only a sophisticated adversary can recognize how he is vulnerable to the exploitation of shi.

***

Shi has many applications. It is used to measure the quality of Chinese calligraphy, assess the appeal of Chinese literary works, and evaluate the aesthetics of Chinese poetry. Jullien and Ames also told me that shi is an example of what philosophers call “incommensurability.” A set of concepts may be too different to understand when considered outside the context of its own language.

Mao was fond of citing shi. His classic essay on Chinese strategy, which invokes shi, is still required reading in both military and civilian Party schools. Chinese writings after 1978 demonstrate that some strategists believe Chinese leaders failed to read shi correctly during the 1950s and ’60s vis-à-vis China’s relations with the Soviet Union. Because the Soviets discovered that China sought to usurp the USSR’s leadership of the Communist world, China failed to extract further foreign investment, trade opportunities, military technology, or political support from the Soviet Union. Stung by their failure to master shi in their relations with the Soviets, the Chinese after 1978 vowed not to repeat the mistake as they developed their new strategy toward the United States.

***

Shi—and Chinese grand strategy—partly entail encircling an enemy by building up one’s own coalition while simultaneously undermining the opponent’s coalition to prevent him from encircling you. The unique Chinese word for strategist, which comes from the Warring States period, means a “horizontal-vertical expert”—a reference to the two main alliances during the Warring States era. The “horizontal” alliance of states, which consisted of states laid out east to west on a map, decided to join with the dominant power, Qin, to reap the benefits of protection and association. The opposing “vertical” alliance, consisting of the many states running from north to south, joined together to oppose the rising Qin state. These two coalitions struggled for decades to erode each other by winning over allies with carrots and sticks.

***

One of China’s most iconic board games, wei qi, harks back to the Warring States period of horizontal and vertical alliances. The purpose of the game is not outright annihilation of the opponent, as in checkers. Instead, the two adversaries take turns placing stones on the board, hoping to encircle the other player’s pieces. Translated literally, wei qi means “encirclement board.” A key to victory is to deceive your opponent into complacency, whereby he expends his energy in a way that helps you even as you move to encircle him.

A second key to winning in wei qi is to deceive the opponent about one’s real direction and intentions. To win, you must entice the opponent by opening up new positions while deceptively encircling him, hoping the opponent will not notice your true strategy. The player who designs multiple positions of encirclement and counterencirclement so that the degree of the encirclement is not apparent to the other wins, and the score is based on who has encircled more of the opponent’s space.

If you can imagine playing this game without knowing that deception is critical to your opponent’s strategy, you’ll have some sense of how America is being played by China. Americans know nothing of the game’s rules. Most of us have never heard of shi. We don’t know we are losing the game. In fact, we don’t even know that the game has begun. For this, we can blame China’s superior strategy, and the illusions held so long by people like me and my colleagues.

***

Chinese military and intelligence services use quantitative measurements to determine how China compares with its geopolitical competitors, and how long it will be before China can overtake them. When I read these quantitative measurements in a difficult-to-obtain book written by Chinese military analysts, I was surprised to see how precisely China measures global strength and national progress. The most startling revelation was that military strength comprised less than 10 percent of the ranking. After the collapse of the Soviet Union—which had the world’s second-mightiest military—the Chinese changed their assessment system to put more emphasis on the importance of economics, foreign investment, technological innovation, and the ownership of natural resources. These Chinese assessments of national power unambiguously predict that a multipolar world will return to a uni-polar order as economic growth trends continue. The Chinese leadership believes that China will then be the world’s leading power.

***

Each deceptive maneuver has been embodied in a popular proverb, and each is recounted in China’s most popular novel, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.

In one deception, Cao Cao, the hegemon, looks for a way to overcome his previous battle losses, so he sends one of his soldiers—a former childhood friend and fellow student of Zhuge Liang’s ally Zhou Yu—to visit the southern commander and find a way to convince him to surrender. Upon arriving at the southern camp, the northern envoy pretends that he came solely to catch up with his old friend; however, Zhou Yu, a master of deception himself, discerns his friend’s ulterior motive. Playing along with the deception, he invites this envoy to a banquet, at which Zhou Yu pretends to drink heavily. That night, still feigning intoxication, he allows his former friend to share his tent, expecting him to search the premises. A fake letter from two northern naval officers commanding a nearby training camp is planted on the desk; the letter tells of a spy working under the northern commander, Cao Cao. As anticipated, the envoy finds the letter, steals it, and quickly returns to the northern camp. Upon reading the false letter, Cao Cao goes into a violent rage and has his two best officers executed, thereby weakening the north relative to the south. Zhou Yu, and thus Zhuge Liang, vastly improved his position and helped shape new momentum or shi.

In another deception, Zhuge Liang asks the strategist Pang Tong for his counsel on how to defeat the north. The plan is to send a false defector to disable the enemy’s most formidable forces, his wooden fleet, by persuading the opponent to lash his ships together so they will be vulnerable to attack. The plot begins when Pang Tong publicly pretends to defect from the southern commander. Hearing that Pang Tong wishes to defect from the southern forces, a northern agent offers to help him escape into the service of Cao Cao. A deliberate leak is part of the plot. Pang Tong, pretending to be drunk, lets slip how vulnerable the northern fleet may be due to seasickness that seems to be affecting the northern sailors. Always deceive by telling the opponent what he already fears. Because Cao Cao has been worried about this sailors’ seasickness, he foolishly asks for Pang Tong’s advice on how to prevent it. The “solution” Pang Tong offers is to stabilize the boats by linking them together with iron hoops into groups of thirty to fifty ships, and to then lay wide planks between each boat so that the soldiers could keep their balance and easily cross from ship to ship. Cao Cao believed the deception and foolishly accepted this advice. If just one of his ships is set ablaze, the whole fleet will be lost. The overall lesson is that a more powerful opponent sometimes can be cleverly persuaded to not use his most powerful advantage against you.

***

Numerous authors comment that the techniques employed by Zhuge Liang in the Battle of Red Cliff were combined in a brilliant sequence: assessing propensity, practicing deception, employing special forces for decisive attack, manipulating high-level dissent, and forming a strategic coalition while isolating the opponent.

Yup. That’s it. Was too busy to post IAS related content, therefore posted this to keep the momentum going. 🙂