A formerly secret 2013 Pentagon report, The Strategic Consequences of Chinese Racism: A Strategic Asymmetry for the United States, argues “China is a racist superpower.” It makes for eye-opening reading on how both the Chinese people and the American deep state think.
This book-length paper, which was posted online as the result of Freedom of Information Act litigation and then discovered by Twitter user @s_decatur, is by an author whose name remains redacted. But we know for sure that it was commissioned by the legendary nonagenarian strategist Andrew Marshall.
This shadowy mandarin started his career as a machinist in Detroit during WWII, then joined the RAND Corporation in 1949 to do Dr. Strangelove-like nuclear war planning. Henry Kissinger brought him into the Nixon White House and in 1973 Defense Secretary James Schlesinger created the enigmatic Office of Net Assessment for Marshall to think deep thoughts like a terrestrial Hari Seldon about the future of superpower rivalries.
But it is said that in the 1970s Marshall debunked the CIA’s contention that the Soviet Union was an economic dynamo and argued for bankrupting the USSR through defense spending competition. Then in the mid-1990s, he contended that Middle Eastern terrorists were a relatively minor distraction while America’s great rival in the 21st century would be China.
Marshall seldom spoke to the press, so his name went largely unknown. On the other hand, over his four decades in office, he commissioned something like $400 million in studies by national security intellectuals, many of whom enthusiastically testify to Marshall’s brilliance at asking the important questions.
Whether Marshall represented an exception to Cochran’s Rule that “There is no Inner Party”—that in modern America there’s no all-knowing O’Brien in 1984 or Mustapha Mond in Brave New World who understands how everything works—remains obscure. But this study of Chinese racism he ordered is at least more interesting than our usual discourse.
Delivered at the time of the Obama administration’s “pivot to Asia,” this 254-page report on how America should expose and exploit China’s deep-seated racism to win the competition for global influence, especially in Africa, cost taxpayers $262,600. The author’s name is blacked out, but is likely political scientist Bradley A. Thayer, currently at the U. of Texas, San Antonio.
