This is my first book review! I was only able to get through the first 20 or so pages before I was cringing so hard I could not read the book anymore. Here we go! The author of the book is Michael Pillsbury, who has been ‘studying’ China for the past 5 decades. To his credit, he does speak Chinese but I found this does not increase the quality of analysis. He’s been working with the defense department/White House as a consultant on China, so this guy has shaped actual policy regarding USA’s foreign policy towards China. I noticed that the start of every chapter includes a quotation from an old book or some folk proverb. The introduction quote is “Deceive the heavens to cross the ocean.” This is meant to prime the reader into believing what the author wants them to believe, that China is somehow deceitful. Since this is just the introductory quote, I’ll get back to this later. The book starts with a story about how the author attended an art event at the Smithsonian Institute, where a Chinese artist named Cai Guo Qiang blows up a Christmas tree. This is a good way to start the book narratively speaking as it is supposedly a metaphor for how China is attempting to crush America and subvert ‘Western’ norms, the thesis of the book, but this argument is not substantiated. He continued to talk about Cai’s art performances, instead of actual Chinese state policy. What I found a little humorous is the author makes a point on how Cai told viewers to appreciate 'redeeming beauty in terrorist attacks and warfare," and the source for this quote is a paper by University of Manchester professor William A. Callahan who says “Yet regardless of our aesthetic judgments about his work we need to appreciate how the violence of Cai’s art is going in the opposite direction from Beijing’s official policy that celebrates China’s peaceful rise as a responsible stakeholder.”! The author fails to mentions this in the book of course. Something throughout the introduction is how the author likes to link the views of a small number of people unrelated to the Chinese government into the views of the Chinese government. For example, “Chinese bloggers were enjoying the spectacle of their hero destroying a symbol of the Christain faith only a stone’s throw from the U.S Capitol.” How many Chinese bloggers? It could be that Cai was widely criticized in China, but that is besides the point the author wants to make. The author also quotes several medieval and ancient texts. He quotes ‘Thirty-Six Stratagems’ multiple times, and makes a note of how Mao Zedong brought a book called ‘The General MIrror for the Aid of Government,’ a stratagem guide from the Warring States period, about 2,200 years ago. The author does not explain why these texts are relevant to modern Chinese state policy, and I’m not exactly sure of the reason Pillsbury mentions these old texts. It might be to reinforce the author’s assertion that Chinese people love deception and deceiving people, a note he makes several times. The introduction chapter includes several false assumptions that American policy makers have made. Here is where it is revealed the condescending and chauvinistic attitudes of the author and his colleagues. The first false assumption is “Engagement brings complete cooperation.” He starts this section with “For four decades now, my colleagues and I believed that “engagement” with the Chinese would induce China to cooperate with the west” and “They haven’t. In short, China has failed to meet nearly all of our rosy expectation.” What engagement! Is what I’m thinking. The USA has supported colour revolution in China and surrounds China with military bases! The author makes no attempt at explaining how america has engaged with China in a positive way, and I reckon that’s because there isn’t. However, here is the ‘evidence’ Pillsbury offers that supposedly shows Beijing non-peaceful intentions. “From thwarting reconstruction efforts and economic development in war-ravaged Afghanistan to offering lifelines to embattled anti-Western governments in Sudan and North Korea, China has opposed the actions of and goals of the U.S. government. Indeed, China is building its own relationships with America’s allies and enemies that contradict any peaceful or productive intentions of Beijing.” No citations are provided for this paragraph and no specific example of the examples are provided either. This is where I believe that China policy makers in the USA are delusional. I really don’t want to sound mean, but that’s what I think. How could anyone believe that USA is aiding in reconstruction efforts and economic development in Afghanistan. They’re the ones who are bombing them!

False assumption #2 is ‘China is on the road to democracy.’ this is more or less the standard view of Chinese politics in USA. Here is the first sentence. “China has certainly changed in the past thirty years, but its political system has not evolved in the ways that we advocated of engagement had hoped and predicted.” The hopes and predictions of China hawks in the USA are constantly thwarted. Here’s why I think that is: they are again, delusional, and also racist. I believe a big part of the reason why China hawks are very ‘hopeful’ about China is racial chauvinism. There is no rational explanation as to how anything Pillsbury or other China watchers in the USA have done that would make a rational person believe their beliefs were come true. Again, no explanation for how Pillsbury and other China watchers’ hopes are to come true are explained. The basis for this hope is simply “I want this to happen, therefore it will happen.” This is American exceptionalism at play. Here’s something else that I struggle to see how the author believes what he does. He explains, in 1997, how he visited China to witness democratic elections in a village. Here is the reasons he explains the election is not democratic: “The candidates were allowed no public assembies, no television ads, and no campaign posters. They were not allowed to criticize any policy implemented by the Communist Party, nor were they free to criticize their opponents on any issue. There would be no American-style debates over taxes or spending or the country’s future. The only thing a candidate could do was to compare his personal qualities to those of his opponent. Violations of these rules were treated as crimes. One candidate I spoke to asked me if this was how democratic elections worked in the West. I didn’t have the heart to tell him the truth. China’s hawks had already done away with true elections.” This already sounds more democratic than USA elections, as if we are to only go by what the quote says, Chinese politicians can not use personal wealth to overspend on ads, thus creating an oligarchy, they do not perform ad hominen attacks, which would create polarisation,a and there is no strategies outside debates that can influence the election, such as strategic ad placement. This already sounds much better than USA style elections.

The other false assumptions are much the same as the first two, talking about how China is purposefully deceiving the ‘West,’ pretending they are weak and collapsing, a very chauvinistic example in ‘China wants to be -and is- just like us,’ and ‘China’s Hawks are weak,’ which includes turning a Chinese government statement of "China will never become a hegemon’ and to the author this means “China will the most powerful nation.” The author over the very short part of the book I read does make wild assumptions about what certain statements mean. For example, Xi Jinping once mentioend the phrase ‘road to renewal’ and that is somehow nationalist in sentiment, and how an obelisk titled “Monument to the People’s Heroes,” which is a monument dedicated to Chinese soldiers throughout the 19th an 20th century. This is taken by the author as a statement of China’s nationalist and hostile sentiment. Another assumption which bewildered me is how the author makes a point as to how a mistranslation of the phrase ‘natural selection’ in Huxley’s ‘Evolution and Ethics’ into Chinese means ‘elimination.’ And apparently this one word “came to dominate the Chinese understanding of Darwin’s thought,” and “Mao’s writings were filled with Darwinian ideas.” What quote is apparently Darwinian you may ask… Here it is… “There cannot be two suns in the sky.”

I’ll leave it at that! I hope you enjoyed my review! I’m really not sure if it’s a good review or not. >< I feel maybe I rambled too much or was repetitive too much.