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February 25, 2015 at 6:25 PM EST TRANSCRIPT GWEN IFILL: Now to a controversial warning about China from a new bestselling book that’s becoming a lightning rod for criticism. Chief foreign affairs correspondent Margaret Warner explains. MARGARET WARNER: Since the 1970s, Michael Pillsbury has focused on China, as a Pentagon official and consultant and now at the conservative Hudson Institute. Over the years, the Mandarin speaker has grown ever more hard-line in his views, and it is clear in his bestselling, but controversial new book, “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower.” He says it’s based on Chinese and American documents and books and conversations with Chinese military officials and defectors. Critics have shot back, accusing him of sloppy use of evidence. I spoke with Pillsbury last week. The very title of your book asserts that America has been in denial, that China has a secret strategy to replace the United States. What is that strategy based on? MICHAEL PILLSBURY, Author, “The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower”: The strategy is based on two things, first, China’s historical role in what we would today call the leader of the world. They want to restore themselves to the role they played for 2,000 years. The second part of the strategy is, they know from their economists that they can’t build China into a replacement for us by themselves. They have got to get certain things from the outside world, and they have worked very hard in the last 30 years to get those things. MARGARET WARNER: And is that so surprising? MICHAEL PILLSBURY: It’s surprising because they have denied publicly such an ambition. They portray themselves as weak, backward, and in great need of assistance from us. MARGARET WARNER: And the United States has been a very willing partner in assisting them.
MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Yes, because of false assumptions. We thought, going back 30 or 40 years ago, if China becomes prosperous, the middle class will demand democracy, and so we’re looking at a country that, yes, was stronger, but it has our values. That didn’t happen. That’s what I call the greatest intelligence failure in our history. MARGARET WARNER: But there are other countries in the world that consider themselves great historical powers and want to restore that greatness. What makes China, as you portray it, so malevolent or so inimical to UAEL PILLSBURY: I think it’s the unreformed China that I’m worried ab.S. interests? MICHout. They plan to keep the Communist Party structure, the approach to human rights, the approach to pollution. They plan to keep all that and become the dominant economic power. This is what I’m warning against. MARGARET WARNER: But wasn’t it inevitable, given China’s size and its resources, its population, that it was bound to grow by leaps and bounds? It didn’t need the United States for that. MICHAEL PILLSBURY: No, they did need us from for that. It’s very clear from their own writings. They believe that roughly half their growth over the last 30 years was brought about by favorable terms of trade and investment from America. We’re crucial to their strategy. MARGARET WARNER: Now, you yourself made a personal evolution. You say you used to be what’s known in the trade as a panda hugger. MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Yes. Well, a panda hugger, that I was before, is someone who uncritically just wants to help and support China, has a sense of the old — what I call the old narrative. I came to realize I had been wrong from the beginning about who was really managing whom in this relationship. We have, I hate to say been their pawns because we have got a lot of benefit from our trade with China and our investment. And they have made some enormous progress. But I think, overall, the Chinese are managing us much better than we are managing China. MARGARET WARNER: Now, people who have looked at this book criticize it for relying way too much on the view of the hawks inside the defense and intelligence and military establishments, and that there are many other competing voices in the Chinese establishment. Aren’t there? MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Yes, that criticism is valid. But the rise of the hawks has happened. It’s a fact. President Xi Jinping shows more attention to them, has involved them more in his deliberations, goes to meet with them in person. So, I think the rise of the hawks that I’m claiming has taken place is not up for debate. It’s happened for sure. Other civilians are involved, too. It’s not just the military. They have a much more nationalistic view that China should speak out and really be something now, and not wait until 2049. MARGARET WARNER: So, now, what would a Chinese-led global order look like that is detrimental to U.S. interests? MICHAEL PILLSBURY: The Chinese concept of the new global order, they say in very pleasing language, will be fair. The south and the poor countries of the world, there will be no pressure anymore against dictators, that issues of a global nature, like climate change, pollution in general, these matters will be handled by consensus, not by pressure groups from what they perceive as, you know, unusual concern with American values. That will all be gone. The key point about the new Chinese-led global order is America will not be a global leader. The removal of the United States as what they call the hegemon is the most important thing. So the new order itself is just going to have no American leadership. That’s the fundamental point. MARGARET WARNER: There is a counterview, which is the U.S. and China are now the world’s two biggest economies, and if we enter into a period of conflict with them, we do so at our own peril. MICHAEL PILLSBURY: Well, it’s true. We want to cooperate with China, but what I’m arguing is a little bit different. I’m saying we need to be shaping China at the same time as they’re shaping us. They have enormous influence in our political system, with our businessmen. There’s no reason we can’t try to have the same kind of influence in Beijing. MARGARET WARNER: So if the United States wants to forestall this, being replaced as the global superpower, what does it most need to do? MICHAEL PILLSBURY: We need to strengthen organizations that are dedicated to shaping China. We have to wake up that the Chinese are not poor and backward anymore, and it’s time to shape them. But, secondly, we are falling behind in almost all the competitiveness indicators there are. We have got to get our own house in order first, or the Chinese are going to win the marathon by default. MARGARET WARNER: Michael Pillsbury, thank you. |
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http://www.economist.com/news/books-and-arts/21644128-complete-guide-frances-brainy-hero-freedom-fighter
Jean-Paul Sartre Freedom fighter The complete guide to France’s brainy hero Feb 21st 2015 | From the print edition Sartre: A Philosophical Biography. By Thomas R. Flynn. Cambridge University Press; 436 pages; $39.95 and £30.
WHEN the French thinker and writer Jean-Paul Sartre died in April 1980, 50,000 people followed his hearse through Paris. It was a fitting tribute in a country where intellectual life is prized. Philosophers, though, are judged by their arguments, not their funerals. On that sterner test, how has Sartre’s philosophy held up? Thomas Flynn’s thorough new study offers expert guidance. Most technical philosophers tend to look at the world as armchair scientists. They puzzle about time or knowledge, matter, numbers and chance. They ask how such things really are. Sartre, who also wrote bestselling fiction and plays, thought about the world as an off-duty novelist. He asked what the world was like for people. They were not detached physicists or passive observers. They lived, aided or obstructed by a material world, which included their bodies. For good or ill, they were thrown into contact with others. Sartre’s concern, in a phrase, was what it was like to be human. The topic sounded unmanageable. But its core elements were familiar enough: the mind, human values and human freedom. Sartre linked them together in big loose equations. The human mind was free, notably in its imaginative capacity to entertain possibilities and think of the world as different from how it was. People were free of religious or ethical authorities, so obliged to find their own values. They were free finally to define themselves or choose a form of life as they pleased, for there was no human nature—nothing essential, that is—to being human. Those three freedoms added up to “existentialism”, an otherwise obscure label by which Sartre’s thought became known. How far it impresses you will depend on whether you prefer philosophy in careful, dry bits or in bold flashes that briefly light up a territory. Sartre’s most famous philosophical treatise, “Being and Nothingness” (1943), suffered from trying to embed pointed insights into human thought and experience in a dense metaphysical theory that split not just mind from world but the mind of any one person from everyone else’s. In compensation, the book displayed Sartre’s rare psychological acuity and brought out the pervasive role of the imagination. Sartre stressed an ever-present emotional element in human thinking that philosophers preoccupied with truth and validity tended to overlook. He was fertile and original in putting previously neglected mental phenomena such as shame, pride and fear at the centre of how to understand self-awareness. To cultural and gender studies he bequeathed the enticing idea that the judgmental look or predatory gaze of others shaped and commonly distorted a person’s sense of who they were. In a typical twist, Sartre added that people were entirely free to reject the verdicts of others and their stereotyping. To deny that freedom involved self-deception or bad faith. So, generally, did blaming your situation on your past, your parents, the unconscious, social pressures or human nature. Those were craven excuses. At any moment you could avow or disavow your situation. Strictly, it was yours only once you claimed ownership. Such freedom was daunting, Sartre recognised. In his brutal phrase, everyone was “condemned” to be free. In the philosopher’s superabundance of ideas, imagination did most of the work. Neither passive nor whimsical, this power of supposition underlay the simplest intentions and grandest plans. Its uses ran from the banal and domestic to the heroic and political. As the power to suppose that society might be different, imagination dominated Sartre’s radical politics. On Paris walls in the student upheavals of May 1968 appeared the Sartrean slogan, “Power to the imagination”.
Besides a weakness for overgeneralisation, Sartre tended to over-empower the mind. At one extreme, he was never far from gifting people with mysterious mental powers to shape events. His runaway prose tended to blur the simple point that picturing a better society did not create a better society. Imagination was needed for action but was never itself enough. People still had to act. At another extreme, Sartre risked lapsing into stoical banalities. People had no protection, he admitted, against time, pain or death. They were still free, the philosopher insisted, to say what those ills meant to them. People were free to grant or deny value to life’s vicissitudes. How far, though, did refusing “ownership” of pain remove pain? Sartre’s published output is reckoned at 20 pages a day throughout his working life. No English-speaking philosopher has read that vast corpus with greater industry than Mr Flynn. His new biography scrutinises the works chronologically from start to finish. It includes Sartre’s fiction and plays, as well as the political or critical essays. Mr Flynn has done Sartrean initiates a large service, but this is not an introduction. Though he writes within Sartre’s thought, using his vocabulary, Mr Flynn stresses unresolved puzzles. Technical philosophers can sound as if they are trying to describe a world without humans, Sartre as if describing human life without a world. Sartre saw the difficulty, but never completed his later attempts to relocate the isolated mind of “Being and Nothingness” in a social world of rights and duties. Nor did he let up on the clash between limitless freedoms to change attitudes to a situation and their apparent powerlessness to change the situation itself. A cheery, can-do sort would say that life is not always so bleak. People are rarely or completely so trapped. No, indeed. But sometimes they are, which is one reason why Sartre’s work, though little read these days, remains interesting and even topical. From the print edition: Books and arts |
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