Panda slugger: the dubious scholarship of Michael Pillsbury, the China hawk with Rumsfeld's ear.

• Author: Ho, Soyoung

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 mined 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.

The Wall Street Journal took notice of Pillsbury last year in a front-page story that described him as "one of the Pentagon's most influential advisers on China, with a direct line to many of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's top aides." The story observed that China, too, has been "keeping tabs on Mr. Pillsbury." For good reason: Thanks in part to Pillsbury's influence, the Pentagon's 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR--the blueprint for future defense strategy and spending--identifies China as the nation with "the greatest potential to compete militarily with the United States." And the Pentagon's most recent annual report to Congress on China's military contains passages that appear to be lifted directly out of Pillsbury's writings, including warnings of "asymmetric programs" in the works. This can get expensive. The Wall Street Journal recently reported the "the Pentagon now cites China as justification for a range of proposed procurements, most notably a new, multibillion-dollar long-range bomber program."

While Pillsbury has achieved prominence within the Defense Secretary's office, many defense experts within the military, government agencies, and universities reject his scholarship as tendentious at best, and their professional distaste is heightened by personal dislike. "Brilliant" and "charming" are words frequently used by acquaintances to describe Pillsbury, but so are "combative," "conspiratorial," and "ruthless." His career has been one of numerous short-lived jobs, at least three dismissals, and a revoked security clearance.

For hardliners in the Bush administration, however, having a combative, conspiratorial, or ruthless personality isn't exactly a drawback. Rather, it is seen as a desirable quality in an administration that has been in an almost constant state of war with expert consensus, which it sees as a fortress of liberal bias and as a hindrance to bold action. Still, even if the White House might prefer to operate solely on instinct, administration officials need experts inside and outside of government to help them set strategy, to lace their speeches with supportive factoids, to win arguments in inner-agency battles with opponents, to produce studies purportedly showing that all the other experts are wrong ("Carbon dioxide: They call it pollution. We call it life."), and to speak to journalists looking for "both sides" of a debate.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, eccentric experts on the Middle East dominated administration thinking, but most are now back on the outside of policy. "The Middle East is just a blip," explained a 2005 Atlantic Monthly article headlined "How We Would Fight China" by Robert D. Kaplan. China is the new long-term game, and Pillsbury is the neocons' successor, the latest Cassandra with Rumsfeld's ear. Unfortunately, this is a White House with an unenviable record of picking its Cassandras. The right ones (Eric Shinseki) have often been ignored in favor of the wrong ones (Ahmed Chalabi). And the consequences have been serious. But which Cassandra is Michael Pillsbury?

Out-hawking the hawks

In person, Pillsbury, a blue-eyed, consciously polished figure in his early sixties, is a combination of charm and caginess. At a recent meeting at a Corner Bakery in downtown Washington, D.C., he sipped lowfat milk and genially fended off questions about his work. He attributes negative press such as the story about his mistranslation between Rumsfeld and Hu to rumors spread by "panda huggers" (a pejorative term for those who take a more benign view of Beijing). "I try to focus on a topic that no one focuses on," he says, contrasting himself to his peers. "It's mainly the future, more than five years ahead, sometimes 10 years ahead."

Actually, scores of China experts within the military, the intelligence community, and the academy devote their lives precisely to assessing the Chinese military and its possible impact on U.S. interests over the next five or 10 years. Nearly all have arrived at the same conclusion: that China's military is nowhere close to being a credible threat to the United States or its interests.

China's military...