Pillsbury, as the director for Chinese Strategy at the conservative Hudson Institute, was invited by the Center for China and Globalization to talk about trade. I'd never expected to get the interview from the China hawk, so his acceptance caught me by surprise.
China has big ambitions. It wants to overtake the United States as the world’s superpower by 2049, a hundred years after the Communist Party took power in Beijing. And this will be at the expense of the U.S., which unwittingly helped its strongest rival now closer to attaining its dream.
This is the gist of a 2015 book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as Global Superpower,” by Michael Pillsbury, an American China watcher who had served several U.S. administrations since the time of Richard Nixon in the 1970s.
Writes US defence analyst and China expert Michael Pillsbury in his book The Hundred-Year Marathon: “In a classic example of…turning the energy and momentum of others to your advantage, China would borrow the techniques from the West to develop (its financial sector and industry)—all with the active tutoring from institutions such as the World Bank and private firms such as Goldman Sachs.