The Hundred-Year Marathon Lib/E: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower

One of the US government's leading China experts reveals the hidden strategy fueling that country's rise--and how Americans have been seduced into helping China overtake us as the world's leading superpower. For more than forty years, the United States has played an indispensable role helping the Chinese government build a booming economy, develop its scientific and military capabilities, and take its place on the world stage, in the belief that China's rise will bring us cooperation, diplomacy, and free trade. But what if the "China Dream" is to replace us, just as America replaced the British Empire, without firing a shot? Based on interviews with Chinese defectors and newly declassified, previously undisclosed national security documents, The Hundred-Year Marathon reveals China's secret strategy to supplant the United States as the world's dominant power, and to do so by 2049, the one-hundredth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic. Michael Pillsbury, a fluent Mandarin speaker who has served in senior national security positions in the US government since the days of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, draws on his decades of contact with the "hawks" in China's military and intelligence agencies and translates their documents, speeches, and books to show how the teachings of traditional Chinese statecraft underpin their actions. He offers an inside look at how the Chinese really view America and its leaders--as barbarians who will be the architects of their own demise. Pillsbury also explains how the US government has helped--sometimes unwittingly and sometimes deliberately--to make this "China Dream" come true, and he calls for the United States to implement a new, more competitive strategy toward China as it really is and not as we might wish it to be. The Hundred-Year Marathon is a wake-up call as we face the greatest national security challenge of the twenty-first century.

About the Author :
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, 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 US Senate committees. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He lives in Washington, DC. Malcolm Hillgartner is a professional actor, playwright, and songwriter. In 2007, he began recording audiobooks and has since recorded more than 175 titles. He has won multiple Earphones Awards and was named a Best Voice of 2013 by AudioFile magazine.

Review :
"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" "A presentation of China's hidden agenda grounded in the author's longtime work at the US Defense Department...Fodder for concerned thought." -- "Kirkus Reviews" "A provocative exploration of the historical sources of China's grand strategy to become number one." -- "Graham Allison, director of Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs" "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." -- "Christian Science Monitor" "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, New York Times bestselling author" "Pungently written and rich in detail, this book deserves to enter the mainstream of debate over the future of US-Chinese relations." -- "Foreign Affairs" "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, New York Times bestselling author"