"It is too soon to ask the weight of the Emperor's cauldrons."
-Spring and Autumn Annals
「楚王問鼎︰鼎之輕重，未可問也」
《春秋》
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. And of the fourteen imperial dynasties, ten have each lasted longer than the entire history of the United States." The Chinese ying pai hawks do not get lost in their long, complex history; instead, they have sought specific lessons from historical successes and failures that they can use to win the Marathon.
The hawks write books about a key era of history out of which China was forged, known as the Spring Autumn and Warring States periods (春秋戰國)— five centuries of largely political struggles. The final two-and-a-half-century stretch began around 475 BC and ended with the unification of seven feuding states under the Qin dynasty. (The word China comes from Qin.) Both periods were plagued by power politics, intrigue, deception, and open warfare among China's warlords. It was a brutal, Darwinian world of competition, where warlords formed coalitions to oust one another, all with the goal of becoming the ba (霸), roughly equivalent to the English word hegemon. Five ba rose and fell in the Spring Autumn period, then two coalitions competed in the Warring States. The hawks draw lessons for the Marathon from both.
The ying pai strategists in Beijing have long drawn key lessons from the Warring States period, lessons that in large measure define China's approach to strategy today. However, the China policy community in the United States has only recently come to grips with this fact—and even today this view is not widely accepted across the U.S. government. Our decades-long ignorance of China's strategic thinking has been costly; our lack of understanding has led us to make concessions to the Chinese that seem outright senseless in hindsight.
Undoubtedly, America's ignorance—and that of the West more broadly—can be at least partly attributed to two key factors. First, from the seventeenth century to the modern era, Sinologists, missionaries, and researchers who visited and studied China were essentially led to accept a fabricated account of Chinese history. Chinese sources played up the Confucian, pacifist nature of Chinese culture and played down—and in many cases completely omitted any reference to—the bloody Warring States period. Additionally, Mao's campaign to "Destroy the Four Olds and Cultivate the Four News," (「破四舊、立四新」) whereby the Communist Party set out to destroy and erase the memory of long-standing Chinese customs, culture, ideas, and habits in support of the Cultural Revolution, led many in the West to conclude that China had decided to make a complete break with its pre-Communist past.
As U.S. policymakers have increasingly begun to recognize that Chinese strategy is, at its core, a product of lessons derived from the Warring States period, so too have the Chinese recently become more public about this. At first, only the hawks mentioned these ancient lessons References to the period first appeared in internal Chinese publications in the 1990s, and the Chinese have referred to events and maxims from the Warring States period in communiqués intercepted by American intelligence and in discussions of military doctrine. In 1991, China's leaders secretly used a Warring States proverb, tao guang, yang hui (韜光養晦). When the document containing this phrase leaked, Beijing translated it as the cryptic and generic "bide your time, build your capabilities." But in its proper context, the proverb actually alludes to overturning the old hegemon and exacting revenge, but only once the rising power has developed the ability to do so. Many experts in America did not at first believe these references because they conflicted with their preconception that evidence of China's aggressive strategic intentions must be discarded if it emanates only from the mouths and pens of the nationalist ying pai hawks in China, who were widely assumed to be fringe elements.
Most scholars of China have asserted in a general way that China's ancient past influences its present, but that it does so only metaphorically. However, those scholars lacked access to internal Chinese government planning documents showing how the Chinese explicitly use the ancient axioms. Nor have these scholars had access to Chinese defectors who previously held high positions inside the Chinese government. My forty years of contact with the Chinese military and Chinese security officials may have biased me in the opposite direction of my fellow China experts: I now see the hawks as mainstream. The moderates sometimes seem to defer quietly to the hawks, as if they were under Party discipline not to reveal any details about the hawks' growing influence.
Based on tips from these defectors, I began reading restricted essays by China's top generals and strategists illustrating how the Warring States lessons can and should be applied today to bring about a China-led world. I learned that the Warring States mind-set has long been dominant among China's leaders. As an official U.S. government visitor to Beijing, making annual visits starting in 1995, I was given access to China's restricted government-run bookstores, after which I would interview the authors of some of the books on sale. These books and articles explicitly distilled ideas from the hundreds of years of successes and failures of rising powers during the Warring States era.
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 (《孫子兵法》), and I was invited to present a paper at three of the sessions as a scholar from the Pentagon. The hawks treated me as a fellow hawk, from the U.S. Department of Defense, which they presumed—wrongly, it turned out—knew all about the lessons of the Warring States. These conferences continue to this day. I visited one military bookstore in October 2013 and was surprised to see two things. First, there were clearly more lessons from ancient Chinese history than ever before. And when I asked one officer if there were more books of lessons from Chinese history in the newly designated part of the bookstore where the sign said "Chinese military officers only," he joked, "Yes, those books are not for foreigners to see because their lessons are too specific."
I noticed that the authors who started this movement two decades ago have formed associations and research units. The first was created in 1996, and the most recent was set up in 2012. Many colonels who launched these studies have been promoted to leadership posts as generals and admirals, and a new generation of younger authors is carrying on the work.
Stratagems of the Warring States (《戰國策》), highly popular and closely studied in China, is a collection of fables that has never been translated into English. Were it translated, more Americans might better understand Chinese leaders and their intentions when they speak in ways inspired by lessons from that turbulent period in China's history.
Students are taught lessons of the Warring States period, most of which derive from the Stratagems, which is considered a manual for statecraft. China's modern military scholars and political philosophers hark back to this time in Chinese history more than any other. A committee of twenty-one Chinese generals has sponsored the publication of a nine-book series titled Strategic Lessons from China's Ancient Past, which draws on the Warring States period. Many proverbs used today in internal Chinese government documents come from the struggles between the Warring States.
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 (勢). 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 (圍棋), 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.
Many of the most significant elements of China's Marathon strategy were developed by members of the military, especially the ying pai hawks. 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.
In June 1970, I, like other China experts in the U.S. government, knew none of this. That month, I was selected from a list of American PhD candidates for Mandarin-language training at Taiwan National University, which was to become my first foray into experiencing Chinese culture and history. The two-year course focused on Chinese cultural immersion. I lived in Taiwan with a Chinese family and attended classes all day in a small cubicle with one of four teachers who rotated throughout the day. The courses centered on a set of textbooks, which Chinese students still use today, of the best classical writing in Chinese history. 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 (外儒内法) (on the outside, be benevolent; on the inside, be ruthless).
The ying pai hawks today speak of an allegory about America and China. 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 (楚) and Zhou (周). 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." (桀有昏德，鼎遷於商，載祀六百。商紂暴虐，鼎遷於周。德之休明，雖小，重也。其建回昏亂，雖大，輕也。天祚明德，有所底止。成王定鼎於郟鄏，卜世三十，卜年七百，天所命也。周德雖衰，天命未改，鼎之輕重，未可問也。) 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. On the international level, if you are a rising power, you must manipulate the perceptions of the dominant world power to not be destroyed by it. To ask the size and weight of the cauldrons was a strategic blunder by the king of Chu.
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").
The natural world order, the Stratagems explains, is hierarchical; systems without a ruler at the top are merely transitional. That world order is, of course, inconsistent with the official line from Beijing today. China's leaders claim to want a multipolar world in which the United States will be first among equals. Put differently, they do not want to ask the weight of the emperor's cauldrons.
In truth, however, they see a multipolar world as merely a strategic waypoint en route to a new global hierarchy in which China is alone at the top. The Chinese term for this new order is da tong (大同), often mistranslated by Western scholars as "commonwealth" or "an era of harmony." However, da tong is better translated as "an era of unipolar dominance." Since 2005, Chinese leaders have spoken at the United Nations and other public forums of their supposed vision of this kind of harmonious
world.
An important element of China's grand strategy is derived from what is known in the West as mercantilist trade behavior—a system of high tariffs, gaining direct control of natural resources, and protection of domestic manufacturing, all designed to build up a nation's monetary reserves. The Chinese invented mercantilism (zhong-shang) (重商), and the country's leaders reject the West's contention that mercantilism has been rendered obsolete by the success of free markets and free trade.
Because it embraces mercantilism, China is wary that trade and markets will always provide sufficient access to needed resources. China's leaders have an almost paranoid fear of a coming crisis leading to regional or global resource scarcity. As a result, they are determined to obtain ownership or direct control of valuable natural resources overseas—just as Europe's mercantilist monarchs attempted to do by colonizing the New World in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This is one of the many lessons in the Stratagems.
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.
The contrast with the American model for national intelligence services is stark. In the United States, it is considered unethical and even illegal for the government to provide American corporations with intelligence to increase the nation's economic growth. In my forty years in the U.S. government, I have never heard of a case in which the U.S. intelligence community was tasked to attempt to increase America's GDP in such a way. It is true that U.S. ambassadors can and do assist American corporations in winning lucrative contracts in foreign countries, but that's a far cry from government spies providing stolen technologies and proprietary information directly to American corporations.
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.
As of 2011, while the United States spent nearly 5 percent of its GDP on its military, the Chinese spent only 2.5 percent of theirs. The Chinese strategy has been to forswear development of global power projection forces and to maintain a curiously small arsenal of nuclear warheads, perhaps numbering fewer than three hundred. 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." Chinese leaders believe that building a bigger military would be a potentially catastrophic provocation of the United States. (After all, having lived under a total U.S. embargo from 1949 through 1963, China already has a sense of just how painful arousing America's wrath can be.) They think China instead needs a force level large enough to support economic growth but small enough to avoid prematurely provoking the American hegemon. 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. Chinese writings on the revolution in military affairs have hinted for two decades about the ideal time to break out, which is still many years ahead.
If the contrast between the Warring States mind-set and a traditional American view of the world can be distilled into a single, fundamental difference, it is this: Americans tend to believe that relations with other countries ebb and flow between periods of competition and cooperation; Beijing's assumption is that the U.S. government has a long-standing policy of hostility and deception toward the Chinese government. If this difference were merely a matter of Chinese misunderstanding due to
ignorance, then it would be possible and indeed prudent for the United States to eliminate, or at least reduce, this misperception. Unfortunately, that's not the case. Chinese leaders distrust of the United States is largely based on deeply held cultural axioms that underlie nearly all Chinese strategic decisions. Their distrust of the United States is therefore unlikely to change.
At the heart of Chinese strategy is shi (勢), 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. It is exactly the lack of recognition of the potential exploitation of shi that is dooming American strategy toward China.
A close approximation to shi in American popular culture is "the force" from George Lucas's Star Wars, which draws heavily on Eastern philosophy. Though not a perfect analogy, shi suggests that mystical forces allow the alert leader to identify and harness opportunities to turn events to his will. The most able can even use these opportunities to get others to act in ways that work to their advantage. As Sun Tzu (孫子) described it in his chapter on shi in The Art of War, "those skilled at making enemy move do so by creating a situation to which he must conform." A simple way to think of shi is to recall how Tom Sawyer tricked his friends into painting the fence for him. He studied their psychologies, realized what motivated them, and then manipulated them into doing his work for him. A significant component or feature of shi is called wu wei (無為), which means to get other nations to do your work for you.
The very idea of shi gets to the heart of a distinctly Chinese view of the world, because it conveys an almost mystical fatalism about the role of human actors in the universe. Humans and nations can interact with each other and change events, but those events have an independent momentum all their own. Shi appears in compound vocabulary terms that mean "to shape a situation," "to build up military posture," "to assess the overall strategic political situation," or "to seek a balance of power." It is the duty of "the sage"—the rough equivalent of a modern-day statesman or intelligence professional—to perceive shi before the opponent does.
Only recently have Western scholars come to appreciate the concept of shi. It first appeared in 1983, when Roger Ames, a professor of philosophy at the University of Hawaii, defined it as part of his translation of an almost unknown Chinese book on political administration from the Warring States period called The Art of Rulership (《准南子︰主術》). After the publication of The Art of Rulership in English, a French scholar named François Jullien picked up where Ames left off. Jullien popularized shi in seven books that characterized it as a uniquely Chinese concept. His assertion prompted left-wing critics to claim that he was "othering"—that is, treating Chinese culture as alien and therefore somehow inferior. The critics claimed shi was nothing unique.
Jullien was not without his defenders, most notably within the Chinese military. People's Liberation Army authors asserted that shi and many others aspects of Chinese strategic philosophy were indeed unique to China.
When I first saw the concept of shi in internal Chinese government writings in the late 1990s, I did not know its exact meaning and connotation, but I immediately discerned that it was critical to Chinese leaders' strategic thinking. I met with Ames and Jullien, and their discoveries and insights into the concept helped me to decipher the meaning of Chinese military and intelligence reports that repeatedly refer to shi.
They told me that the concept of shi is heavily influenced by Taoism, a religion and philosophy whose adherents desire to live in harmony with the driving force—the Tao (道)—behind everything in the universe. Just as Taoists believe the universe is in a constant state of reinventing itself—a belief embodied by the yin-yang symbol—both shi's strength and its polarity can be suddenly reversed. Chinese military authors frequently refer to how shi can tip in one direction or another, or even reverse itself instantly. This puts a premium on the early detection of shifts, and the need for monitoring indicators that would show when such a change is under way.
Ames and Jullien said that shi has dozens of translations, such as "shaping" the situation, or "eventuating." Other translators call shi the creation of opportunity, or creation of momentum. "Unfolding" or "nudging" are also English words approximating the concept. 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.
Instead, China would find a way to coax the United States into providing American technology, foreign investment, political support, and access to America's domestic market for Chinese products—without tipping off the Americans to China's larger ambitions. Beijing found ways to encourage the U.S. intelligence community to help strengthen China, rather than sound the alarm—as the KGB had done with regard to China's intentions toward the Soviet Union. Beijing even encouraged American conservatives to see China as a partner against the Soviet Union, a fellow opponent of détente, and a nation that was not really even Communist."
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 (縱横家), 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. Finally, the horizontal alliance soothed its rivals by denying any ambition to replace them and appealing to their short-term interests. Deception successfully broke apart the opposing coalition, and Qin, its strongest member, conquered the vertical alliance. Today, Chinese authors frequently refer to the need to discreetly counter America's global alliance system in a way that will not alert the Americans that an alternative alliance is being created.
One of China's most iconic board games, wei qi (圍棋), 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.
In his book On China, Henry Kissinger gives five examples of how China uses shi, all of which deal with its approach to war and crises. Learning about the importance of shi has clearly influenced his views on China. In contrast to his four earlier books that recount his meetings with Chinese leaders without mentioning shi, his new approach cites shi repeatedly. Kissinger highlights an important aspect of shi by warning that China characterizes its relationship with the United States as
one of combative coexistence: "Americans to this day often treat the opening to China as ushering in a static condition of friendship. But the Chinese leaders were brought up on the concept of shi—the art of understanding matters in flux.... In Chinese writings, the hallowed words of the American vocabulary of a legal international order are rarely to be found. What was sought, rather, was a world in which China could find security and progress through a kind of combative coexistence, in which
readiness to fight was given equal pride of place to the concept of coexistence" (italics mine).
The Chinese attack on Vietnam in 1979, Kissinger explains, resulted from the shi concept: "In a broader sense, the war resulted from Beijing's analysis of Sun Tzu's concept of shi—the trend and 'potential energy' of the strategic landscape. Deng aimed to arrest and, if possible, reverse what he saw as an unacceptable momentum of Soviet strategy, China achieved this objective in part by its military daring, in part by drawing the United States into unprecedentedly close cooperation."
Shi is crucial to understanding how Chinese strategists assess the balance of power in a given situation and then act in accordance with how the shi is flowing. An important part of their assessment relies on the kinds of quantitative metrics planners pioneered during the period of the Warring States. One of the striking features of Chinese assessments of shi is that the term is used both as a concept of measurement that analysts must examine and also as something that can be created and manipulated by the actions of the commander or national leaders.
There is a misleading popular image of ancient Chinese culture that focuses on the sayings of Confucius, poetry, calligraphy, and Chinese art. The impression given is that the ancients were more creative and philosophical than they were analytical and mathematical. Yet the RAND Corporation scholar Herbert Goldhammer has pointed out that during the Warring States period, some strategists could supposedly convince their opponents to concede just by showing them quantitative calculations dooming the opponents to defeat. Quantitative measurements played a vital role in ancient Chinese politics, and they continue to do so today.
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 unipolar order as economic growth trends continue. The Chinese leadership believes that China will then be the world's leading power.
Key to attaining that goal is China's concept of shi. Beijing applies the concept in almost every aspect of its relations with the United States, and just as Tom Sawyer's friends had no idea that Tom was manipulating them into painting his fence, America's policymakers have no idea they are being used.
One of the most frequently cited examples of shi in Chinese military writing centers on the Battle of Red Cliff (赤壁之戰), which occurred in AD 208. Also referred to by its Chinese name, the Battle of Chibi, it perfectly displays this alternative Chinese view of righteous and praiseworthy strategy emerging from deception, and of taking advantage of an enemy's miscalculations. Like the Battles of Thermopylae, Cannae, Agincourt, or Waterloo in the West, Red Cliff serves as a seminal moment in China's military history and tradition. To this day, the battle and a series of deceptions related to it are studied by Chinese military leaders and discussed in textbooks and novels.
In the Battle of Red Cliff, a less powerful kingdom in the south plots against a stronger and more powerful one in the north, as both contend for total control of China. As the campaign begins, the northern commander, Cao Cao (曹操), has more than one million troops arrayed along a river, vastly outnumbering the southern forces commanded by Zhuge Liang (諸葛亮) positioned on the other side. However, many of the northern soldiers were unused to riverine warfare, and so the north lost an initial battle that gave the south control of the waterway. Next came a series of deceptions by each side. 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 (三國演義).
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 (周瑜)—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 moment or shi.
In another deception, Zhuge Liang asks the strategist Pang Tong (龐統) 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.
Now comes the actual Battle of Red Cliff. As a strategy lesson, the key will be how the southern leaders would assess shi. Zhuge Liang pays close attention to the weather, forecasting that an easterly wind will arise. When the sage detects the arrival of the moment of shi, decisive action must be immediate. Zhuge Liang orders the assault to begin that night. Because of the wind and the iron hoops linking the boats, the northern fleet is quickly engulfed in flames. The hegemon had been humiliated.
Temples all over China today celebrate the God of War. His moment came on the same day as the battle of Red Cliff. With his mighty fleet gone, the defeated northern commander Cao Cao flees through the forest. He stops to rest a number of times, still cockily laughing at Zhuge Liang's supposed incompetence for allowing his escape. Remembering the ancient proverb from The Art of War that advises appearing strong where one is weak, Cao Cao concludes that the enemy forces must be arrayed along the main road and that fires were set to deter him from taking that trail. He has been deceived again.
In the final deception, the two greatest deception masters in Chinese history conclude their struggle. Zhuge Liang had anticipated Cao Cao's thought process, and therefore had placed his troops not on the main road, but on the trail under the smoke. The many ambushes along the now arduous trail leave the northern commander with only three hundred men, but he still manages another escape. He believes he is safe, and once again laughs at Zhuge Liang's supposed stupidity. However, once again he marches into an ambush, resulting in his final defeat.
The long series of deceptions destroy Cao Cao, who had commanded the largest military force in China. He is bested by the machinations and deceptions of a smarter, almost superhuman sage—one who detects windows of opportunity and disguises his intentions.
"A single deception can cause a vast defeat." This belief is echoed in much of the commentary on the Battle of Red Cliff authored by China's nationalist military hawks today.
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. Conversely, Cao Cao failed to apply the lessons, causing him to lose the conflict he had begun. Two prominent Chinese military authors emphasize that the victors at Red Cliff applied the strategy of "wait and see" until propensity was favorable. Another adds that espionage helps define propensity—the moment when the enemy destroys itself by internal friction and begins to decline, thereby providing the ideal opportunity to attack.
For Americans today, one of the lessons of the Warring States should be that we are perceived by the Chinese to have the strategy of a Warring State, too. Chinese strategic thinking does not argue that the Warring States stratagems are relevant only to China. Our long-held view that the hawks in China are powerless, fringe fanatics handicaps our understanding. A dangerous implication of this emerges when China expects the United States to behave like an aggressive hegemon eager to retain its dominant position; when the Americans instead promote détente, the UN Charter, and democracy and human rights for all, China gets suspicious. What are the Americans really up to? Perhaps some among China's moderates and reformists understand America's good intentions. The hawks, however, see only American deception.
Source: Michael Pillsbury's The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower p.31-51
