For more than forty years, the United States has reached out to China, helping it develop a booming economy and take its place on the world stage, in the belief that there is little to fear and everything to gain from China's rise. But what if the Chinese have had a different plan all along?
Michael Pillsbury is the director of the Center on Chinese Strategy at the Hudson Institute and has served in presidential administrations from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama. Educated at Stanford and Columbia Universities, he is a former analyst at the RAND Corporation and research fellow at Harvard and has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and on the staff of four U.S. Senate committees. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He lives in Washington, D.C.
#1 National Bestseller
"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 "This is without question the most important book written
about Chinese strategy and foreign policy in years. Michael
Pillsbury has spent more than four decades for the Pentagon and the
CIA talking to and learning from a core of Chinese 'hard-liners'
who may be the driving force behind Chinese foreign policy today
under Xi Jinping. Based on meticulous scholarship and written in
lively, engaging prose, this book offers a sobering corrective to
what has long been the dominant, soothing narrative of
Sino-American cooperation."--Robert Kagan, author of The World
America Made and Of Paradise and Power "A provocative exploration
of the historical sources of China's grand strategy to become
#1."--Graham Allison, Director of Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer
Center for Science and International Affairs "Michael Pillsbury has
been meeting with, talking to, and studying the 'hawks' in China's
military and intelligence apparatus for more than four decades,
since back when America and China were cooperating against the
Soviet Union. In this fascinating, provocative new book, he lays
out the hawks' views about the United States and their long-term
strategies for overcoming American power by the middle of this
century. In the process, the book challenges the wrong-headed
assumptions in Washington about a gradually reforming China. Given
the direction China has been taking in the past few years,
Pillsbury's book takes on immediate relevance."--James Mann, author
of About Face: A History of America's Curious Relationship with
China, The China Fantasy, and Beijing Jeep "The Hundred-Year
Marathon is based on work that Michael Pillsbury did for the CIA
that landed him the Director's Exceptional Performance Award. It is
a fascinating chronicle of his odyssey from the ranks of the
'panda-huggers' to a principled, highly informed, and lonely stance
alerting us to China's long-term strategy of achieving dominance.
He shows that we face a clever, entrenched, and ambitious potential
enemy, suffused with the shrewdness of Sun Tzu conducting a
determined search for the best way to sever our Achilles' heel. We
have vital work to do, urgently."--R. James Woolsey, former
Director of Central Intelligence and chairman of the Foundation for
Defense of Democracies
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