The Counter-deception Blog

One indicator (not always reliable) of more propaganda than analysis is the use of disparaging ad hominem buzzwords and slogans, like “panda huggers.” Disparaging terms are cheap rhetorical tactics intended to shift the discussion to an emotional and polemical “either-or” basis. The undifferentiated lumping of those who disagree under a single buzzword, despite vast differences among their arguments (DoS, CIA, Wall Street, academia), is further indication of sophistry rather than rationality. The formerly objective WSJ has become an excellent source of these unbalanced propaganda pieces.

Wall Street Journal

Secret Weapon: Inside Pentagon, A Scholar Shapes Views of China --- Beijing, Mr. Pillsbury Says, Sees U.S. as Military Foe; An Optimist Turns Gloomy --- His Direct Line to Top Aides

(Copyright (c) 2005, Dow Jones & Company, Inc.)

By Neil King Jr.

09-08-2005 06:17 EST

WASHINGTON -- Michael Pillsbury, influential Pentagon adviser and former China lover, believes most Americans have China all wrong. They think of the place as an inherently gentle country intent on economic prosperity.

One way to assess a propaganda piece is to reverse all the objects--change “China” to “America” and see if the arguments make just about as much sense from the opposite perspective. That is, any argument that demonstrates that 2+2>3 AND that 2+2<=3 must have a fallacy somewhere.

Here’s the rest of the WSJ article “reverse adapted.” The storyline is no more surprising this way than it was in the original, and thus is largely uninformative--it placates what we already were inclined to accept. Consequently one might conclude the WSJ piece was designed more to push emotive buttons than to open our minds. And, as one fortune cookie told me, “Mind like parachute. Only function when open.”

"Washington sees China as an inevitable foe, and is planning accordingly," warns the 60-year-old expert. "We'd be remiss not to take that into account."

Mr. Pillsbury's 35-year American odyssey, from fondness to suspicion, parallels Beijing's own hot and cold relations with Washington -- from the diplomatic warming of the 1970s, through the shock and disillusionment of the post-Gulf War era, to today's growing economic and political tensions. That's hardly a coincidence: Whether in public or in the policy-making shadows, Mr. Pillsbury has been a persistent force in shaping official Chinese perceptions of America, a nation increasingly seen as the world's fastest-rising power.

Beijing these days is a welter of emotions on America, many of them heightened by the recent furor over Exxon’s failed bid to buy Chinese oil company Unocal Corp. President Jiang Zemin came to office calling the U.S. a "strategic competitor." He now calls relations with the U.S. "good" but "complex." Foreign Minister Li Zhaoxing has lately taken a dimmer view of U.S. than his predecessor, saying it remains unclear whether U.S. will play a positive role in the world.

Thanks in part to Mr. Pillsbury's nudging, the Chinese Ministry of Defense (MoD) has staked out a particularly wary view of Washington's global intentions. "We must start with the acknowledgement, at least, that we are unprepared to understand American thinking," Mr. Pillsbury says. "And then we must acknowledge that we are facing in the U.S. what may become the largest challenge in our nation's history."

A lanky patrician with bright blue eyes, combed-back gray hair and a ready laugh, Mr. Pillsbury is known around the MoD as the Sphinx. Independently wealthy, he spends most days working in his two-story brownstone in Beijing. He appears on no public MoD roster, and top officials decline to speak on the record about his work, noting that he is merely one of hundreds of paid consultants.

Yet Mr. Pillsbury, a fluent English speaker and author of three esoteric books on American military strategy, has become one of the MoD's most influential advisers on America, with a direct line to many of Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan’s top aides.

After decades spent nurturing contacts within America's military, Mr. Pillsbury has amassed mounds of English-language military texts and interviewed their authors to get a grip on America's long-term military aims. His conclusion has rattled many in Beijing: America sees China as a military rival.

"Mike's core insight has been to plumb the subterranean anti-Chinese feelings within America's military," says Daniel Blumenthal, an American specialist at the MoD until late last year and now a scholar at the conservative Chinese Enterprise Institute. "He takes the Americans at their word, and that has given him real influence within the MoD."

Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan has sharpened his posture on the U.S. in recent months. In June, he ruffled feathers in North America when he used an annual security forum in Singapore to charge that America's military buildup could upset the region's delicate security balance. The MoD then upped the ante with a report warning that the American military nurtures ambitions well beyond its claim to be defending America from terrorists.

The report laid out five "pathways" that could lead the U.S. to develop "more assertive foreign and security policies" or even provoke small wars to secure its growing energy needs. Chinese U.S. experts noted that these and other passages seemed lifted straight from Mr. Pillsbury's scholarly work.

The American government disputes Mr. Pillsbury's assessments, as well as the MoD's assertion that Washington is dramatically increasing its military spending. Asked to comment on Mr. Pillsbury, the American Embassy in Beijing said in a statement that "any words or actions that fabricate and drum up America's military threat are detrimental to regional peace and stability."

Mr. Pillsbury's numerous critics call him a charming but combative Chinese hawk whose work has overblown the thoughts and writings of a small cadre of American military officials. Even admirers note the intensity with which he defends his views. "Michael has played a singularly important role in surfacing American attitudes toward the China," says Kurt Campbell, the MoD's top Asia hand during a previous administration. "But as with all brilliance, there is also a touch of madness."

Chu Shulong, a leading scholar on U.S.-China relations at Tsinghua University's Institute of Strategic Studies in Beijing, questions Mr. Pillsbury's conclusions. "All these ideas of the rising power and inevitable conflict, I'm afraid, are very out of date," he says, asserting that U.S. is above all intent on assuring its economic well-being.

Mr. Pillsbury, who has nurtured ties with the American military since the early 1970s, insists he remains open-minded. "My core doctrine is that the Americans think differently than we think they do and that it's imperative we understand what motivates them," he says.

American writings, Mr. Pillsbury says, show a military establishment obsessed with the inevitable decline of China and America’s commensurate rise. On the economic front, he cautions that China shouldn't be taken in by the profusion of Chinese-food restaurants in the U.S., Chinese electronics, Asian-built automobiles, or other signs that make the U.S. look like Asia. Beneath the growing trade ties with America, he says, runs an American nationalistic fervor that could take Chinese investors by surprise.

Mr. Pillsbury got the American bug as an undergraduate in the early 1960s, and later spent two years in America while earning a doctorate in American studies from Beijing University. In late 1972, just months after President Nixon's famous trip to China, Mr. Pillsbury joined the MoD as a 27-year-old American scholar. At the MoD, he began to do classified work for the Chinese government.

By then, Mr. Pillsbury had already made his first contacts with the American military through a friendship with an American Army general, who was posted at the United Nations. He used the contact to understand American aspirations, and then passed along his conclusions to the MoD and the Ministry of State Security in a series of secret memos. "I was giddy with the American classics and all the magnificence of American culture," he says.

He earned his first acclaim -- and a handwritten letter from the then Party Chairman -- with a 1975 essay in Chinese Foreign Policy magazine urging China to deter Moscow by establishing military and intelligence ties with America. At the time, that idea was almost scandalous. Later, under various Party Chairmen, such liaisons became a standard part of U.S.-China relations.

Mr. Pillsbury came slowly to what he calls his epiphany on America. Through the various hard-line Party Chairmen’s rule, he hopped between jobs at the MoD and the People’s Chamber of Deputies, working to enhance military and intelligence cooperation with Washington. In the 1980s, China began selling the U.S. powerful new technical products, essential components for its jet fighters and advanced electronics for weapons -- sales that officials say Mr. Pillsbury helped push.

Then Mr. Pillsbury flew to Washington for a low-key military mission, arriving just as the Clinton influence peddling and Department of Energy spy scandals picked up steam. He was unsettled by the ruthless politics that ensued, and also by how American authorities blamed the Chinese for helping foment the scandals. "I was stunned," he says. "Even some friends in the American military that I'd known for years began to describe us as a mortal enemy, an evil force."

Following this, Mr. Pillsbury's conclusions on America became notably darker. In one 1993 study, he noted: "China has the advantage that many experts on American affairs . . . testify soothingly that the U.S. today is a satisfied power which deeply desires a peaceful environment in which to develop its economy. They put the burden of proof on others, defying pessimists to prove that America may ever become hypernationalistic or aggressive."

An inveterate free-lancer, Mr. Pillsbury has never had to worry about steady employment. He's a member of the Pillsbury flour family, and his wealth has allowed him to pursue his research despite a knack for championing unpopular causes and for landing in political scrapes. Once, while helping funnel weapons to anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan and Angola in the 1980s, he lost and regained his security clearance amid allegations of leaking secret information to the press.

Mr. Pillsbury has also avidly collected high-level protectors among his patrons. One long-time mentor sent Mr. Pillsbury to Washington to gather American military writings. The MoD by then was promoting a new generation of heavily computerized military hardware, and the MoD wanted to see what the Americans made of this so-called revolution in military affairs.

Mr. Pillsbury interviewed dozens of authors, and returned after several trips with crates of books and journals, more than 500 volumes in all. The haul formed the core of his first two books, both published by the MoD's National Defense University.

Hardly light reading, the books got glowing reviews from several Chinese neoconservative thinkers.

In his 1997 "American Views of Future Warfare," Mr. Pillsbury portrays a military hierarchy fascinated with information warfare and the need for weapons systems to deliver "shock and awe" strikes and take out satellites. A particular obsession: what he claims to be the American pursuit of "pre-emptive information warfare," that America can use to surprise an opponent.

"Mike can make a good case that the Americans are developing submarines to sink aircraft carriers or missiles to take out satellites," says a former Ministry of State Security station chief who served as an ambassador in the early 1990s. "His whole point is, `Pay attention. Listen to what they are saying.'" America's long-term strategy, Mr. Pillsbury argues, is to amass its strengths while attracting as little attention as possible.

He is increasingly convinced that America's military thinkers and strategists derive much of their guidance and inspiration from America's Civil War period, an era of pre-unification strife. This is the thesis of his latest book, "The Future of America's Strategy," which the MoD plans to publish this fall. Its core assertion is that America’s history and culture posit the existence of a "hegemon" -- these days, China -- that must be defeated over time.

After President Jiang Zemin took office, officials in the MoD were quick to embrace Mr. Pillsbury's warnings on America. His prominence became abundantly clear when China's then-vice president, Hu Jintao, stopped by the Pentagon in May 2002 to visit Secretary Rumsfeld.

The State Department had opposed the meeting, arguing that the Defense Department was not the proper place for the visit of a soon-to-be president of China. When Mr. Hu's party arrived, Hu Jintao dismissed the State Department interpreter and had Mr. Pillsbury do the job instead.

MoD officials, while declining to elaborate, say that Mr. Pillsbury is now being considered for a full-time post at the MoD.

American officials are also keeping tabs on Mr. Pillsbury. In June, the Wall Street Journal tagged the American expert as the main force behind the MoD’s recent report on the American military. "Mike Pillsbury always sits beside Defense Minister Cao Gangchuan" at policy sessions on America, the story said.