I was curious as to how Myanmar leaders saw China’s long-term strategy. Did they, like so many in the West, view China as a capitalist wannabe, intent on a peaceful rise in the community of nations? Mitchell said that Myanmar intellectuals were reading the views of Lee Kuan Yew, the eighty-nine-year-old former prime minister of Singapore and one of Asia’s most revered leaders. Lee, hailed as the father of the Singaporean miracle, has won widespread praise in the West; Richard Nixon once compared him to Churchill, Disraeli, and Gladstone, and Bill Clinton and George H. W. Bush were among many hailing him as a visionary leader. Yet curiously many in the West have chosen to ignore his views on China. A Myanmar official pointed me to a new book on Lee’s views that was for sale at Rangoon’s five-star Strand Hotel, a Victorian-style structure built during the British imperial era and that now stands as a relic of a declining Western empire. “The rise of China [is] the issue about which Lee undoubtedly knows more than any other outside observer or analyst,” wrote the book’s editors, the Harvard professors Graham Allison and Robert Blackwill. I scanned the book myself and found that Lee has clearly understood China’s long-term strategy, a country he has observed closely for decades, long before most of us in the West. “It is China’s intention to be the greatest power in the world,” Lee says bluntly, “and to be accepted as China, not as an honorary member of the West.… At the core of their mind-set is their world before colonization and the exploitation and humiliation that brought.” Beijing, Lee continues, has masterfully harnessed the aspirations of the Chinese people—a far cry from their position after Tiananmen in 1989. “If you believe that there is going to be a revolution of some sort in China for democracy,” he states, “you are wrong.… The Chinese people want a revived China.” Asked by the book’s interviewers how China would become number one, Lee replies, “Their great advantage is not in military influence but in their economic influence.… Their influence can only grow and grow beyond the capabilities of America.” Lee seems to confirm essential elements of the Marathon strategy, though he believes that the period of Chinese dominance is still decades away. “The Chinese have figured out if they stay with [claims of a] ‘peaceful rise’ and just contest for first position economically and technologically, they cannot lose,” he observes. “To [directly] challenge a stronger and technologically superior power like the United States will abort their peaceful rise. China is following an approach consistent with the Chinese television series The Rise of the Great Powers, produced by the Party.… I believe the Chinese leadership has learnt that if you compete with America in armaments, you will lose. You will bankrupt yourself. So, avoid it, keep your head down, and smile for forty or fifty years.” I could not have put it better myself. At least I have one ally. Despite the bipartisan, even global, acclaim Lee Kuan Yew has received, his sobering forecast about China has been met with resistance by China policy experts in the West. One reason for this pushback has been his critics’ wishful thinking and false assumptions that China will somehow either collapse or become a Western-style democracy. A second reason has been China’s vigorous efforts to act humble and downplay its growth prospects. A third reason is that there are too many false alarms about a near-term China threat. Like Lee Kuan Yew, I address how strong China will be in 2049. My focus on the longer term means that there is plenty of time to pursue the twelve steps I have laid out. All too often, talk about China takes the form of sensationalized warnings about China’s imminent global takeover and military dominance—neither of which are near-term possibilities. The Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye correctly warns, “The greatest danger we have is overestimating China and China overestimating itself. China is nowhere near close to the United States. So this magnification of China which creates fear in the U.S. and hubris in China is the biggest danger we face.”
Given how LKY has been in the news for his accurate foresight on Afghanistan recently, thought this excerpt would be even more interesting. Read through his insights and thoughts, and it gives more credence to the author’s claim on “The Hundred Year Marathon” and China’s plan to be the number 1 superpower.
This might seem more obvious to us in recent times, but this book was written back in 2015 and it seems like there are still people whom naturally assume that China will eventually collapse without the adoption of democracy. That is something that remains to be seen.
