I haven't ordered Michael Pillsbury's new book about China's plot to take over the world (The Hundred-Year Marathon: China's Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower. Instead, I obtained Sax Rohmer's 1913 novel on the same subject, which can be had gratis from Amazon in a Kindle edition. "The Insidious Dr Fu Manchu" portrays a Chinese genius who plans a rising of the East to overwhelm the West. It has the double advantage of being more entertaining and free.
Michael Pillsbury, a former defense and intelligence official now at the Hudson Institute, claims that China has planned a âhundred-year marathonâ since the days of Mao Zedong culminating in world domination. The difference between Rohmer's fantasy and Pillsbury's scholarship is that Pillsbury may turn out to be right after the fact. China may dominate the world, and future historians well may reconstruct China's intent to dominate the world from the same sort of documents that Pillsbury cites.
But China is not planning to take over the world. It doesn't want the world. It doesn't like the world that is, the world outside of China. Unlike Greeks, Romans, Muslims, and European imperialists, it does not want to plant its flag outside its borders, send its young men to conquer and defend new territories, or subject other peoples to colonial rule. Nonetheless, it may inherit the world, reluctantly and by default.
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