Michael Pillsbury, partly the inspiration for President Trump's more confrontational approach to China, pointed to a book by a Chinese colonel about the "post-American era" and "duel of the century." One analyst claims the Chinese have persuaded Americans they are locked in such a duel — though a national survey by my organization, the Eurasia Group Foundation, finds little such concern among the public.
Writers like Michael Pillsbury, who enjoys access to the President, as well as Libby and others are based at the think tank. Vice President Mike Pence delivered a major hardline China policy speech in late 2018 at Hudson, as did Secretary of State Mike Pompeo in October 2019.
And this is the beginning of the selection of superstars, like Michael Pillsbury [a former government official who President Trump has called an authority on China], Matt Pottinger [now deputy National Security Advisor], and Peter Navarro. And others came into the administration, like General [Robert] Spalding. That all started with those early meetings with General Flynn.
Such sentiments echo Michael Pillsbury’s The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower, an influential book widely read within conservative circles in the US, especially by key figures within the Trump administration.
The US president's China "experts" Michael Pillsbury, Peter Navarro and Matt Pottinger are working in parallel with Pompeo to punish, humiliate and isolate the very country they are allegedly expert in. Their bigoted and incendiary anti-China rhetoric puts ordinary Asian Americans at risk. Pillsbury alludes to inscrutably secret Chinese plans while Navarro claims on TV that the two countries are at war because Shanghai Disneyland is now open and the one near his home in Anaheim, California, is closed. The US president abruptly ends a White House news conference, refusing to answer the question of a Chinese-American journalist with a withering put-down, telling her to "ask China".