The epiphany that inspired Wang Xiangsui’s best known book came when he was a 41-year-old colonel in China’s air force, posted near the Taiwan strait.
It was March 1996 and the People’s Liberation Army had launched military exercises intended to intimidate Taiwanese voters ahead of their self-ruled island’s first presidential election. The Chinese government feared that Lee Teng-hui, the incumbent and eventual winner of the election, was determined to formalise Taiwan’s de facto independence.
As the crisis escalated, Mr Wang felt that Mr Lee was more worried about the exercises’ effect on Taiwan’s stock market than he was about the PLA missiles splashing down in the island’s territorial waters. If falling share prices made people feel poorer, Mr Wang reckoned, they might be less inclined to vote for Mr Lee.
“That’s when we military guys realised that the objective of war could change,” Mr Wang, now a 64-year-old professor at a Beijing aeronautical university, told the Financial Times. “It wasn’t just about seizing an island.”
Three years later, while still in the PLA, he and a fellow officer would co-write Unrestricted Warfare, a treatise about the many fronts — trade, economic, technological, psychological — on which a weaker country can challenge a militarily more powerful rival.
Thanks to Unrestricted Warfare, Mr Wang enjoys a reputation as one of China’s leading “America hawks”. Another hawk is Song Qiang, a 54-year-old former journalist and co-author of tomes including China Can Say No, China Can Still Say No and China is Not Happy. China Can Say No, Mr Song’s first and most famous book, was published five months after the Taiwan missile crisis that inspired Mr Wang.
At a time when Francis Fukuyama’s essay on “The End of History” predicted that the future would be characterised by largely peaceful coexistence between liberal democracies, Mr Wang and Mr Song saw the US as a long-term adversary for China.
“Even if China had turned into a western-style democracy [in the 1990s], the games countries play against each other will never stop,” Mr Song said.
Thanks to the new cold war “China hawks” in Washington are urging Donald Trump to wage against China and its ruling Communist party, Beijing-based America hawks such as Mr Wang and Mr Song now look prescient for having warned about Washington’s apparent determination to contain China long before such views became fashionable.
Steve Bannon, the former White House adviser who urged Mr Trump to confront China, said a 2002 English-language translation of Mr Wang’s book had a big effect on how he sees China.
“The confrontation with China is political, cultural, informational and economic. It’s a great-power confrontation,” Mr Bannon told the FT. “The Chinese Communist party has been using all forces of society against us but our response was very hit-and-miss. Under Trump, you’re seeing for the first time all forces of US state power finally come together to confront China.”
The “whole of government” response that Mr Bannon argues the US should adopt against China was dramatically highlighted this week by the arrest in Canada of a senior Chinese telecoms executive. Meng Wanzhou, chief financial officer of Huawei Technologies and also the daughter of its founder, is wanted by American authorities for allegedly violating US sanctions targeting Iran.
Mr Wang said Ms Meng’s arrest was a “hegemonic” act by the US: “You cannot use your domestic laws to regulate foreign countries.”
The US had already been pressuring other western governments to purge their data networks of equipment made by Huawei, one of the world’s leaders in next-generation 5G communications technology. Adding insult to injury, Ms Meng was arrested in Vancouver on the same day that Mr Trump met with Xi Jinping in Buenos Aires and gave the Chinese president a new 90-day deadline to reduce China’s massive trade surplus with the US while also committing to radical “structural” economic reforms.
“Mr Bannon seems to have absorbed some of the most interesting points of [Unrestricted Warfare],” Mr Wang said. “He knows that the confrontation [between the US and China] is not necessarily going to be a military one. But it is too simple to say China wants to wage an [all-fronts] war with the US.”
Judging from the cover of the English language edition of Mr Wang’s book, it is easy to see how it might have leapt off the shelves at Mr Trump’s former political adviser and other China hawks in the US. It depicts the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack by Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network on New York’s World Trade Center and is subtitled: “China’s master plan to destroy America”.
According to Mr Wang, the edition was pirated. He adds that he would never have authorised such a cover or subtitle, which he said misrepresents and sensationalises what is in fact a much drier theoretical tome about the broader nature of modern warfare.
“We were very angry,” Mr Wang recalled. “How could they connect us to Bin Laden? We were the victims of US copyright infringement.” The publisher, a Panama-based company, could not be reached for comment.
While not condoning the September 11 attacks, like many strategists Mr Song said they were a “lucky” development for China as the subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq distracted Washington from its looming 21st century showdown with Beijing. “China is lucky that September 11 shifted the world’s contradictions [to the Middle East] and gave China space to develop,” he said. “But the [China-US] contradiction was certain to come back.”
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Unlike their often pugnacious US peers, such as Mr Bannon and White House trade adviser Peter Navarro, Mr Wang and Mr Song are soft-spoken academic types. Also unlike Mr Bannon and Mr Navarro, neither has ever held an influential government position.
Mr Wang is a party member but said one of the benefits of leaving the PLA for academia was far greater freedom to interact with overseas scholars and experts. For his part, Mr Song’s staunch patriotism has always been viewed warily by Chinese authorities.
The party’s powerful propaganda department limited the sales of his first two books and banned a second printing of China is Not Happy after the first print-run sold out.
“I have never been part of the system or a party member,” Mr Song said. “The propaganda department and other people in the bureaucracy always fear things they might not be able to control.”
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