Image credits- China Daily Source- The National Interest Author- Gordon G.Chang Mao Zedong, as he made his desperate escape from the Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek during the Long March in the 1930s, brought only one book with him, Michael Pillsbury reports in The Hundred-Year Marathon: China’s Secret Strategy to Replace America as the Global Superpower. It was a “statecraft manual” with lessons, stories, strategies and maxims from as far back as 4000 BC. “Chinese strategy is, at its core, a product of lessons derived from the Warring States period,” writes Pillsbury. As the Pentagon insider tells us, Beijing’s approach to the world was set more than two millennia ago, when “China” as a unified state did not yet exist. There is a sense today that the Chinese are the maestros of statecraft, long-term thinkers and masters of the arts of both diplomacy and war. But is it true, as Pillsbury suggests, that China’s strategists think in longer time frames than tho