This is related to the recent post on poor translations exacerbating the perceived “China threat,” but today’s article focuses on one man, the ideologue and China hawk Michael Pillsbury, who appears to be messing things up monumentally with his less than stellar Mandarin translations. He’s Rumsfeld’s favorite “translator,” and he’s as opinionated as they come. (He refers to those who don’t see China as the evil empire as “Panda huggers.”) That means everything he hears goes through his anti-China filter and comes out mangled.
In May 2002, ten months before he became president of China, Hu Jintao visited Donald Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. The meeting, as then-Vice President Hu saw it, had gone well. Routine U.S.-Chinese military-to-military contacts, which had been suspended since 2001 after a tense standoff over a damaged U.S. spy plane, were to be renewed. China’s Xinhua news agency quickly put out a headline announcing the thaw: “Chinese vice-president, U.S. defense secretary agree to resume military exchanges.”
But there was a problem. According to the Pentagon, no such consensus had been reached. Instead, the two sides had merely agreed that the possibility of such exchanges would be “revisited.”
The mix-up, as it turned out, had a likely explanation. According to The Far Eastern Economic Review, Rumsfeld, in a characteristic interdepartmental snub, had barred the State Department’s interpreter from the meeting. The man on whose language skills Rumsfeld had instead relied was not a professional interpreter but a Pentagon advisor and longtime Washington operator named Michael Pillsbury. With a proficiency (up to a point) in Mandarin, a doctorate in political science from Columbia University, and three decades of experience in dealing with the Chinese military, Pillsbury has emerged as a Defense Department favorite. That he may inadvertently have caused Hu to leave Washington with an overly conciliatory picture was also ironic: Pillsbury is one of Washington’s foremost China hawks, consistently warning that Beijing represents a more serious and rapidly growing military threat than other China experts believe.
You have to read through the long piece to get a feel for just how sloppy Pillsbury’s work is, both as a scholar and as a translator. Translation is just part of the story here. More than anything, this article is about China and how the Bush administration sees it as a dire threat – and how they want to see it as a dire threat.
[H]e gives his sponsors the research they want. China may turn into a serious enemy, or it may not. For now, we have chosen to assume the former, along with the costs. If the Bush administration has taught us anything, however, it’s that overestimating a threat can be as dangerous as underestimating one. Rumsfeld and Pillsbury, it appears, take a different view. But what those of us on the outside must decide, once again, is whether the experts the White House hawks are choosing for their particular insight are really experts at all–whether their specialty lies in facts or speculation, in scholarship or in advertising, in conclusions based on evidence or in evidence based on conclusions.
“Read the whole long thing.”
Update: Here’s an invaluable postscriptum. It blew my mind. What timing.
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By OtherLisa
Apropos of this, I just watched the Frontline documentary last night, THE DARK SIDE, which looks at the White House and the DOD versus the CIA in the run-up to the Iraq War. This White House “mistranslates” everything in order to make situations confirm to the scenario they want.
By the way, here’s another staggering little tidbit:
Ron Suskind, George W. Bush and the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB
Ron Suskind’s “The One Percent Doctrine” is out this week, and the Washington Post’s Barton Gellman says it’s full of “jaw-dropping stories” about the Bush administration’s war on terror.
Or lack thereof.
We’ve known for years now that George W. Bush received a presidential daily briefing on Aug. 6, 2001, in which he was warned: “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.” We’ve known for almost as long that Bush went fishing afterward.
What we didn’t know is what happened in between the briefing and the fishing, and now Suskind is here to tell us. Bush listened to the briefing, Suskind says, then told the CIA briefer: “All right. You’ve covered your ass, now.”
(from today’s SALON)
June 21, 2006 @ 10:13 am | Comment
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By Logan
Richard,
I don’t think you should disparage Pillsbury without the proper context. The man basically single-handedly initiated US-China military relations as a graduate student in 1973 through conversations with Chinese generals at the UN, so I don’t think he’s that bad of a translator, nor do I think you can dismiss his scholarship or expertise so readily. Check out James Mann’s About Face, p. 59-60, and Pillsbury’s Foreign Policy article discussing US-China military relations in 1975. I agree he seems to cherry-pick the Chinese arguments in these analyses of Chinese military journals, but I don’t expect anything different from the capabilities-focused analysts at the Pentagon.
June 22, 2006 @ 5:46 am | Comment
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By Logan
Richard,
I don’t think you should disparage Pillsbury without the proper context. The man basically single-handedly initiated US-China military relations as a graduate student in 1973 through conversations with Chinese generals at the UN, so I don’t think he’s that bad of a translator, nor do I think you can dismiss his scholarship or expertise so readily. Check out James Mann’s About Face, p. 59-60, and Pillsbury’s Foreign Policy article discussing US-China military relations in 1975. I agree he seems to cherry-pick the Chinese arguments in these analyses of Chinese military journals, but I don’t expect anything different from the capabilities-focused analysts at the Pentagon.
June 22, 2006 @ 5:48 am | Comment
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By richard
The positive aspects of Pillsbury’s career are in the article, but they are overshadowed by his dramatic about-face. As to whether his translations for the generals in 1973 were good or not, I have no idea.
June 22, 2006 @ 10:40 pm | Comment
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By davesgonechina
“I agree he seems to cherry-pick the Chinese arguments in these analyses of Chinese military journals, but I don’t expect anything different from the capabilities-focused analysts at the Pentagon.”
Reading the Washington Monthly’s discussion of the “Assassin’s Mace” interpretation Pillsbury gives, it’s not a focus on capabilities that’s the problem, it’s ascribing intent where there is none. He quotes Chinese articles as positioning asymmetrical forces as Chinese and conventional forces as American, when the articles do nothing of the kind. He may have done great work in the 70s, and he probably is an intelligent guy, but he spent 15 years after his grad school work playing the Beltway game (badly) only to reinvent himself as just the sort of academic buttress for super-hawks keen to spend like crazy. Richard’s other post only goes further towards his point: certain members of the U.S. government are using China as a whipping boy to promote their own political ambitions. Pillsbury’s sidestepping of the reporters followup questions with inaccurate answers, along with his questionable ties to such scandals as BCCI, severely damage any credibility he built up from his contributions to the 70s detente.
June 23, 2006 @ 11:46 am | Comment
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By Logan
Hey, I’m solidly for the NSC-State line on China rather than the Defense Department’s. I’m just saying that the first post, and the quote in the article that said “But what those of us on the outside must decide, once again, is whether the experts the White House hawks are choosing for their particular insight are really experts at all,” was a bit extreme considering the man’s background.
June 24, 2006 @ 12:16 pm | Comment
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By robertsdottir
Mike Pillsbury has indeed been the subject of a hatchet job in this article. I am a liberal Democrat, a former Clinton supporter since my days in Arkansas when he was Attorney General, and I have known Mike for 43 years. We were at Stanford together – – honors history class.
He is nothing like the person described in the Washington Monthly, and has never claimed to be anyone other than himself. Ms. Ho did him a definite disservice in her doctrinaire article.
I am familiar with the ups and downs of his career, and I can tell you he is an honest, straightforward guy, and one of the smartest ones I know. Almost everyone in our class who knows him likes him or at least admires him, whether we agree individually with his views on every point.
Don’t take my word for it if you like, but go to
http://www.camdenconference.org/conference2006/pdfs/Camden%20Conference%202006.mov
to see the February Camden Conference presentations on China On the World Stage and see for yourself what Mike is really like.
June 24, 2006 @ 6:18 pm | Comment