While we craft a strategy for the next decade or so (see the Donald Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy), China is planning the 200-year future. They are playing a long, long game.
Just stop that long-range thinking nonsense. I've complained about this before:
I find the notion that the Chinese are deep, long-term planners who have great patience is simply ridiculous.
So what if their civilization is ancient? Chinese leaders are born and die just like Western leaders who, by contrast, supposedly are short-term thinkers hamstrung in dealing with the cunning Chinese. Unless you want to argue that somehow Chinese leaders pass along the wisdom of centuries of rulers, why their civilization's age should give them unique planning abilities is beyond me. Are Egyptians also noted as deep, long-term planners who have great patience, hmm?
I maintain that some Westerners see a veil of secrecy and caution in foreign policy, and interpret that as signs of long-range, deep planning.
Seriously, is the argument that China as a 3-millennia old civilization somehow infuses the DNA of Chinese leaders with the wisdom to plan long beyond the span of human lives?
Or is simply being part of the culture create a racial memory of seeing into the future?
What drugs do you have to do to see Maoism, the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution as part of a deep long-range Chinese plan to achieve dominance?
And America which is not even 250 years old is incapable of such purported long-range thinking?
But don't Americans come from ancient civilizations all over the world, including China? Doesn't America have just as much of that "long-range thinking gene" and from a wide variety of ancient civilizations from Asia, the Americas, Europe, and Africa?
That idea of individuals carrying the wisdom of ancient civilizations in their DNA sounds kind of ridiculous when you say it out loud, doesn't it?
And let's do a reality check. China is several thousand years old while America is not even 250 years old, yet China's long-range "Go" planning has gotten them to number 2 on the planet in 3,000 years while America still holds the number 1 position after 250 years based on the inability to think past the next quarter or play a game more complex than checkers?
Explain to me again how the purported long-range thinking edge paid off for China.
Look, I'm certainly willing to entertain that China has a superior strategy. Maybe even a superior long-range strategic ability. But make the case without resorting to silly attributes like superior long-range thinking based on their ancient civilization.
Just stop it. Chinese leaders are humans like the rest of us.
