Review of The Hundred-Year Marathon by Michael Pillsbury
Posted by John Reed on
I am half-way through reading Michael Pillsbury’s book The Hundred-Year Marathon China’s Secret Strategy To Replace America as the Global Superpower.
.
Pillsbury is an extremely hard-working scholar who has spent his adult life deep diving into all of this.
.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are lying, paranoid, conniving murderers who want to take over the world and kill us non-Chinese. They are trying to prevent us from knowing that, although they are not very good at keeping it secret—a word that is in Pillsbury’s subtitle.
.
Hard to call it secret if Pillsbury wrote a book about it and I am writing about it here on Facebook. Their basic shtick from ancient Chinese writings about essentially the Chinese version of Machiavelliism is to lull us into complacency about the threat they actually pose then suddenly hit us with a Pearl Harbor-like surprise attack only one that wipes out all our communication and computers and electricity and ships and defeats us before we know what happened.
.
They do this by stealing our technology and intellectual property, mercantilism (tariffs and high exports, and stockpiling natural resources, on and on. Very elaborate, complex scheme involving everything.
.
Should we be concerned? Sure. I would end all relations with them and cancel all student and other visas and throw all CCP citizens out of the US.
.
However, we have seen this movie before. Hitler and the Japanese were going to take over the world in the 1940s. They were themselves wiped out in less than four years after Pearl Harbor. Then the USSR was going to “bury” us. They stole our nuclear secrets and military secrets like our B-29s and beat us into space, yadda yadda. They disappeared off the face of the earth in 1991.
.
The Japanese were going to replace us in the 1970s when Japan as Number One was a best selling book worldwide in 1979. They were buying up premier US properties like the Empire State Building and Pebble Beach Gold Course. But after the collapse of the asset
price bubble in the 1990s, Japan had two “lost” decades of nearly zero growth. Since, the Japanese economy has been dormant,
mainly as a result of deflation and decreased productivity.
.
Are we guaranteed by some law of nature to always be #1? No. But there are probably some laws of economics that say we will not be defeated by a communist-party-run country.
.
Let me remind you of the idiotic CCP since 1950.
.
• Sent 1.45M drugged-up “volunteers” into Korea against the UN and lost about a million. The US lost 33,686.
• 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign that persecuted 550,000 Chinese
• 1958 “Great Leap Forward” Five-Year Plan which led to the Great Chinese Famine, killing an estimated 15 to 45 million deaths, making it the largest famine in recorded history.
• 1960 Mao’s Cultural Revolution which killed millions who were unsufficiently ideologically pure
• 1978 partial use of capitalism and free markets to escape poverty
• 1980 one-child policy cuts birth rate in half and according to a report by the National Population and Family Planning Commission, there were 30 million more men than women in 2020 because families preferred that their one child be a male and aborted and infanticided many female fetuses and babies to try again for a boy.
• 1989 Tienanmen Square protest and massacre of thousands—not allowed to talk about in China now
• throughout its history, CCP has put party members including many career military in charge of everything including business and the economy
• ascension of Xi Jingping to dictator ending rule the top group of CCP members
• 2020 Uyghur and other Muslim persecution
• 2019 launches the Wuhan virus into the world and tries to cover up their involvement; so far, 6.3M dead and counting
• State-owned enterprises accounted for over 60% of China's market capitalization in 2019 and generated 40% of China's GDP of US$15.98 trillion dollars (101.36 trillion yuan) in 2020. What are state-owned enterprises? The US postal service and Amtrak are American state-owned enterprises. Both always lose money. They are suppose to at least breakeven.
• 2020 According to the IMF, on a per capita income basis, China ranked 59th by GDP (nominal) and 73rd by GDP (adjusted for the cost of living in China). That is just below Romania and just above the Maldives.
• 2022 US GDP growth is expected to exceed China’s for the first time in decades due to extreme covid lockdowns. It has been declining each year in the 21st century.
• 2014 China trying to build a railroad from Shanghai to Madrid. Railroads are 1800s technology. Almost no passenger railroad in the US makes a profit. Because various countries along the way have different track width, shippers have to keep moving the cargo to different size train cars at various locations along the road. Wars or insurgencies anywhere along the road can easily cut it, as can vandals. Ocean-going ships remain the cheapest way to ship good internationally.
• 2015 A survey by The Wall Street Journal of 64 select economists found that 96% of respondents think China's GDP estimates don't "accurately reflect the state of the Chinese economy."
• One of the most polluted places on earth
• Reportedly has a debt problem like the US subprime crisis but being hidden. On 16 July 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that the housing bubble within the Chinese economy had grown to US$52 trillion, eclipsing the 2008 housing market crash within the U.S.
• Recent crackdown on real estate developers because XI does not like speculation bankrupted a number of the world’s biggest developers.
• crackdowns on the most successful entrepreneurs, private tutoring schools, playing video games and other dislikes of Xi
• China is dependent on imports for many important minerals and oil.
• In the 2020s, there has been a general turning against China due to multiple cases of the CCP overdoing pushing people around.
.
As murderous dictators go, CCP is typical of Hitler and Stalin and Mao. Among that crowd, the dictator who murdered the most of his own people is Mao.
.
The basic problem with betting on China and against the US is China has a dictator command economy like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea. Socialism or state-owned “businesses” do not work. We have them in the US—post office and Amtrak. Europe had a head start on the US at being number one economically, but they were too addicted to socialism and welfare. America is one of the most capitalist of the countries of the world and THE most capitalist of the large ones.
.
The CCP leaders are not connected to reality. They are convinced that we the US is trying to do to them and the rest of the world what the CCP is trying to do to us: steal technology, pretend to be weak, operate vast conspiracies to weaken China and Europe and on an on.
.
They not only teach all this nonsense—like Abraham Lincoln was conspiring against China—but they are so insular and have been saying this for so long that believe their own BS.
.
They extremely big on slavish adhesion to wisdom from the era of the “Warring States” in China which goes back as far as 4,000 BC. Their whole plan to destroy us is based on techniques from 6,000 years ago.
.
They are unpersuaded by more recent and non-Chinese wisdom like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) which explains why capitalist economies run circles around command economies. Although their bias for Chinese wisdom goes away when it comes to two German economists: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the authors of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.
.
I think America and the rest of the West needs to stop helping China and beef up our defenses against all the research and development China is doing to kill us. Even there, they are making mistakes, They have recently been building air craft carriers. I believe those have been obsolete since the late 1950s, but it is not obvious because they are useful against Third World countries and there have been no uses of them against modern nations since WW II. Argentina DID sink six British navy ships in their 1982 Falkland Islands War. No one wanted to believe their lying eyes with regard to what they should have learned from that.
.
You destroy aircraft carrier battle groups with a single nuclear warhead delivered by an ICBM. No civilians die in the explosion because it is in the middle of the ocean. Notwithstanding what geniuses many in the West believe of the CCP, they are building extremely expensive aircraft carriers over 70 years after they became obsolete.
.
Pillsbury is an extremely hard-working scholar who has spent his adult life deep diving into all of this.
.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) are lying, paranoid, conniving murderers who want to take over the world and kill us non-Chinese. They are trying to prevent us from knowing that, although they are not very good at keeping it secret—a word that is in Pillsbury’s subtitle.
.
Hard to call it secret if Pillsbury wrote a book about it and I am writing about it here on Facebook. Their basic shtick from ancient Chinese writings about essentially the Chinese version of Machiavelliism is to lull us into complacency about the threat they actually pose then suddenly hit us with a Pearl Harbor-like surprise attack only one that wipes out all our communication and computers and electricity and ships and defeats us before we know what happened.
.
They do this by stealing our technology and intellectual property, mercantilism (tariffs and high exports, and stockpiling natural resources, on and on. Very elaborate, complex scheme involving everything.
.
Should we be concerned? Sure. I would end all relations with them and cancel all student and other visas and throw all CCP citizens out of the US.
.
However, we have seen this movie before. Hitler and the Japanese were going to take over the world in the 1940s. They were themselves wiped out in less than four years after Pearl Harbor. Then the USSR was going to “bury” us. They stole our nuclear secrets and military secrets like our B-29s and beat us into space, yadda yadda. They disappeared off the face of the earth in 1991.
.
The Japanese were going to replace us in the 1970s when Japan as Number One was a best selling book worldwide in 1979. They were buying up premier US properties like the Empire State Building and Pebble Beach Gold Course. But after the collapse of the asset
price bubble in the 1990s, Japan had two “lost” decades of nearly zero growth. Since, the Japanese economy has been dormant,
mainly as a result of deflation and decreased productivity.
.
Are we guaranteed by some law of nature to always be #1? No. But there are probably some laws of economics that say we will not be defeated by a communist-party-run country.
.
Let me remind you of the idiotic CCP since 1950.
.
• Sent 1.45M drugged-up “volunteers” into Korea against the UN and lost about a million. The US lost 33,686.
• 1957 Anti-Rightist Campaign that persecuted 550,000 Chinese
• 1958 “Great Leap Forward” Five-Year Plan which led to the Great Chinese Famine, killing an estimated 15 to 45 million deaths, making it the largest famine in recorded history.
• 1960 Mao’s Cultural Revolution which killed millions who were unsufficiently ideologically pure
• 1978 partial use of capitalism and free markets to escape poverty
• 1980 one-child policy cuts birth rate in half and according to a report by the National Population and Family Planning Commission, there were 30 million more men than women in 2020 because families preferred that their one child be a male and aborted and infanticided many female fetuses and babies to try again for a boy.
• 1989 Tienanmen Square protest and massacre of thousands—not allowed to talk about in China now
• throughout its history, CCP has put party members including many career military in charge of everything including business and the economy
• ascension of Xi Jingping to dictator ending rule the top group of CCP members
• 2020 Uyghur and other Muslim persecution
• 2019 launches the Wuhan virus into the world and tries to cover up their involvement; so far, 6.3M dead and counting
• State-owned enterprises accounted for over 60% of China's market capitalization in 2019 and generated 40% of China's GDP of US$15.98 trillion dollars (101.36 trillion yuan) in 2020. What are state-owned enterprises? The US postal service and Amtrak are American state-owned enterprises. Both always lose money. They are suppose to at least breakeven.
• 2020 According to the IMF, on a per capita income basis, China ranked 59th by GDP (nominal) and 73rd by GDP (adjusted for the cost of living in China). That is just below Romania and just above the Maldives.
• 2022 US GDP growth is expected to exceed China’s for the first time in decades due to extreme covid lockdowns. It has been declining each year in the 21st century.
• 2014 China trying to build a railroad from Shanghai to Madrid. Railroads are 1800s technology. Almost no passenger railroad in the US makes a profit. Because various countries along the way have different track width, shippers have to keep moving the cargo to different size train cars at various locations along the road. Wars or insurgencies anywhere along the road can easily cut it, as can vandals. Ocean-going ships remain the cheapest way to ship good internationally.
• 2015 A survey by The Wall Street Journal of 64 select economists found that 96% of respondents think China's GDP estimates don't "accurately reflect the state of the Chinese economy."
• One of the most polluted places on earth
• Reportedly has a debt problem like the US subprime crisis but being hidden. On 16 July 2020, the Wall Street Journal reported that the housing bubble within the Chinese economy had grown to US$52 trillion, eclipsing the 2008 housing market crash within the U.S.
• Recent crackdown on real estate developers because XI does not like speculation bankrupted a number of the world’s biggest developers.
• crackdowns on the most successful entrepreneurs, private tutoring schools, playing video games and other dislikes of Xi
• China is dependent on imports for many important minerals and oil.
• In the 2020s, there has been a general turning against China due to multiple cases of the CCP overdoing pushing people around.
.
As murderous dictators go, CCP is typical of Hitler and Stalin and Mao. Among that crowd, the dictator who murdered the most of his own people is Mao.
.
The basic problem with betting on China and against the US is China has a dictator command economy like Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea. Socialism or state-owned “businesses” do not work. We have them in the US—post office and Amtrak. Europe had a head start on the US at being number one economically, but they were too addicted to socialism and welfare. America is one of the most capitalist of the countries of the world and THE most capitalist of the large ones.
.
The CCP leaders are not connected to reality. They are convinced that we the US is trying to do to them and the rest of the world what the CCP is trying to do to us: steal technology, pretend to be weak, operate vast conspiracies to weaken China and Europe and on an on.
.
They not only teach all this nonsense—like Abraham Lincoln was conspiring against China—but they are so insular and have been saying this for so long that believe their own BS.
.
They extremely big on slavish adhesion to wisdom from the era of the “Warring States” in China which goes back as far as 4,000 BC. Their whole plan to destroy us is based on techniques from 6,000 years ago.
.
They are unpersuaded by more recent and non-Chinese wisdom like Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) which explains why capitalist economies run circles around command economies. Although their bias for Chinese wisdom goes away when it comes to two German economists: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the authors of Das Kapital and The Communist Manifesto.
.
I think America and the rest of the West needs to stop helping China and beef up our defenses against all the research and development China is doing to kill us. Even there, they are making mistakes, They have recently been building air craft carriers. I believe those have been obsolete since the late 1950s, but it is not obvious because they are useful against Third World countries and there have been no uses of them against modern nations since WW II. Argentina DID sink six British navy ships in their 1982 Falkland Islands War. No one wanted to believe their lying eyes with regard to what they should have learned from that.
.
You destroy aircraft carrier battle groups with a single nuclear warhead delivered by an ICBM. No civilians die in the explosion because it is in the middle of the ocean. Notwithstanding what geniuses many in the West believe of the CCP, they are building extremely expensive aircraft carriers over 70 years after they became obsolete.
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