Michael Pillsbury, the president\u2019s top outside adviser on China, has the president\u2019s ear ahead of negotiations with Xi Jinping.<\/b>
\nWASHINGTON \u2014 Michael Pillsbury had just finished a rib-eye salad at the Cosmos Club on Tuesday when he received a text message from the White House: \u201cThe president is trying to reach you. Call back.\u201d
A day later, Mr. Pillsbury huddled in the Oval Office with President Trump and senior members of the White House economic team ahead of a pivotal weekend meeting in Argentina between Mr. Trump and President Xi Jinping of China.
For more than an hour, Mr. Trump,Mr. Pillsbury and advisers including Steven Mnuchin, Wilbur Ross, Larry Kudlow, Jared Kushner and Peter Navarro, who joined remotely from California, strategized about negotiations with China that could determine the direction of a trade war that has gripped the world\u2019s two largest economies, spooked global markets and shaken diplomatic relations between Beijing and Washington.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Xi are expected to dine on Saturday evening at the G-20 summit meeting in Buenos Aires, where they will talk about the possibility of a trade truce. The United States has imposed tariffs on $250 billion worth of Chinese imports, and the rate of some of the levies is set to increase to 25 percent in January, from 10 percent. Mr. Trump has threatened to impose tariffs on all Chinese imports \u2014 an additional $267 billion \u2014 if a compromise cannot be reached.
Mr. Trump has received conflicting advice from his trade team about how to approach China but it is Mr. Pillsbury\u2019s counsel that the president is most likely to keep in mind.
He has emerged as a key sounding board for Mr. Trump, who has publicly referred to Mr. Pillsbury as \u201cthe leading authority on China\u201d on multiple occasions. (Three times, by Mr. Pillsbury\u2019s count, who said sales of his 2015 manifesto on China have soared as a result.)
Ubiquitous on Fox News in recent months, Mr. Pillsbury\u2019s book \u201cThe Hundred-Year Marathon: China\u2019s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower\u201d has become a lodestar for those in the West Wing pushing for a more forceful response to the threat that China\u2019s rise poses to the United States.
\u201cWe could not have shifted the entire apparatus to this confrontational mode with China if it wasn\u2019t for the intellectual architecture of \u2018A Hundred-Year Marathon,\u2019\u201d said Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump\u2019s former chief strategist who recruited Mr. Pillsbury as an adviser during the transition and used to hand out copies of his book around the White House.
The book, which was published while Mr. Pillsbury was advising the Obama administration as a Pentagon consultant, presents an apocryphal view of China as a clever enemy with a stealthy plan to overtake the United States as the dominant world power by 2049 \u2014 a century after the People\u2019s Republic was founded.
At the time of its release, Mr. Pillsbury\u2019s book was widely mocked as fringe and it drew criticism as subpar scholarship.
Jude Blanchette, former assistant director of the 21st Century China Program at the University of California, San Diego, panned Mr. Pillsbury\u2019s claims of unparalleled access to Chinese sources as \u201cunverifiable,\u201d questioned whether his ideas were lifted from the popular press and said that his footnotes were \u201cfilled with errors, misdirection and puzzling omissions.\u201d
In his book, Mr. Pillsbury describes China\u2019s approach as one of deception, in which its leaders use America\u2019s belief that it can democratize China to \u201cmislead and manipulate American policymakers to obtain intelligence and military, technological and economic assistance.\u201d
Mr. Pillsbury plays into this argument with Mr. Trump, arguing that the clash between the United States and China has evolved precisely because Mr. Trump\u2019s agenda to restore America\u2019s \u201cgreatness\u201d is so directly at odds with Mr. Xi\u2019s own political doctrine for modernizing China, known officially as \u201cXi Jinping Thought.\u201d
\u201cThey take \u2018Make America Great Again\u2019 very seriously,\u201d Mr. Pillsbury, referring to the Chinese, said in an interview this week. \u201cTo them, it\u2019s a violation of the new model of great power relations, it\u2019s a violation of the new era and it\u2019s a violation of \u2018Xi Jinping Thought,\u2019 if you will.\u201d
Tall, bald and broad-shouldered, Mr. Pillsbury has served the United States government in varying levels of prominence as a Chinese and national security expert in administrations dating to Richard Nixon\u2019s. Fluent in Mandarin with a doctorate in political science from Columbia University, Mr. Pillsbury, 73, gained notoriety among China specialists for his ability to gain access to Chinese intelligence and military officials and his knack for finding and translating archived documents that shed light on China\u2019s thinking.
And, like some of those in the Trump administration, Mr. Pillsbury also once considered himself a \u201cpanda hugger\u201d \u2014 someone who thought that China could become an economic and political ally whose growth should be supported.
But Mr. Pillsbury began to take a darker view of China \u2014 and its ambitions \u2014 later in his career, after interviews and discussions with top military and intelligence officials in Beijing. And he has found a soul mate in Mr. Trump \u2014 whose relentless desire to upend America\u2019s trade relationship with China and protect domestic power has produced a trade war that has no natural path to resolution.
Mr. Pillsbury was brought into Mr. Trump\u2019s orbit during the transition period in 2016, after the president-elect spoke by telephone with Taiwan\u2019s president, breaking protocol and angering China.
He has worked closely with Matthew Pottinger, the senior director of Asian affairs on the National Security Council, and the White House considered offering him a formal role, according to a former official, but there were concerns about his ability to get a security clearance. Mr. Pillsbury said that it remained a possibility and that he would like to be the ambassador to China someday.
As Mr. Trump increasingly blurs economic security and national security \u2014 viewing China\u2019s economic rise as a national security threat to America \u2014 Mr. Pillsbury\u2019s knowledge of China has become even more in demand.
Mr. Trump\u2019s economic team is deeply divided on how to approach China, with nationalists like Mr. Navarro and Robert E. Lighthizer, Mr. Trump\u2019s top trade negotiator, often clashing with Mr. Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, and Mr. Kudlow, the director of the National Economic Council, who have offered more conciliatory approaches.
Mr. Pillsbury, whose fairly dark view of China has found resonance, tries to explain to White House officials that China\u2019s leadership has its own internal divisions and advises Mr. Trump on how to leverage those splits to gain an advantage, he said.
When Mr. Navarro, with whom he plays tennis and who featured him in his movie \u201cCrouching Tiger,\u201d asked him how to rankle the Chinese earlier this year, Mr. Pillsbury begrudgingly told him that using the term \u201ceconomic aggression\u201d would grab their attention because the word \u201caggression\u201d has a more sinister meaning in Mandarin.
Despite warning him that the phrase would be offensive, and probably a bad idea, in June it was emblazoned in the title of a White House report on China\u2019s intellectual property practices.
In practice, Mr. Pillsbury offers more nuanced prescriptions for responding to China\u2019s march to global dominance. Perhaps most surprisingly, Mr. Pillsbury said that, ideologically, he gravitates more toward the views of Mr. Mnuchin and Mr. Kudlow, who have focused on communication and negotiation with the Chinese and have avoided publicly antagonizing Beijing. Others in the administration, including Vice President Mike Pence and Mike Pompeo, the secretary of state, have openly clashed with the Chinese.
\u201cTo try to get them to sign a piece of paper saying they\u2019ve done all these bad things is futile,\u201d Mr. Pillsbury said. \u201cIt gets back to the goal of the president. If the goal is to humiliate the Chinese and tell the base we\u2019re stopping this raping of our country, this approach won\u2019t work.\u201d
Some have suggested that Mr. Pillsbury\u2019s more doveish tone is part of an effort to stay in the good graces of the Chinese. He has traveled to China four times in the last 18 months and is planning to go again in December, when he will share insights about the United States with Chinese think tanks.
Consulting and writing have made for a lucrative career for Mr. Pillsbury, who is working on another book and has mused about a movie of his own. He lives in a $7.5 million Georgetown mansion with his wife, a British-born ballerina who was a member of the Royal Ballet Corps, and they own a well-curated collection of Asian art. For recreation, he flies a small Cessna, which he crashed last year during a landing in Maryland. He was unhurt. .
These days, Mr. Pillsbury likes to boast \u2014 with a smile \u2014 that he has become a \u201chumble, modest fellow.\u201d<\/p>\n