Chinese Strategic thought naturally tends toward deception

In an article, an excerpt from his book, suggesting there exist five dangerously wrong policy assumptions made about China, Michael Pillsbury also says the following:

In our hubris, Americans love to believe that the aspiration of every other country is to be just like the United States. In recent years, this has governed our approach to Iraq and Afghanistan. We cling to the same mentality with China.

In the 1940s, an effort was funded by the U.S. government to understand the Chinese mind-set. One conclusion that emerged was that the Chinese did not view strategy the same way Americans did. Whereas Americans tended to favor direct action, those of Chinese ethnic origin were found to favor the indirect over the direct, ambiguity and deception over clarity and transparency. Another conclusion was that Chinese literature and writings on strategy prized deception.

Two decades later, Nathan Leites, who was renowned for his psychoanalytical cultural studies, observed:

Chinese literature on strategy from Sun Tzu through Mao Tse-tung has emphasized deception more than many military doctrines. Chinese deception is oriented mainly toward inducing the enemy to act inexpediently and less toward protecting the integrity of one’s own plans.

 

let me get this straight. The author is an old China hand, a very old China hand. Began advising the Nixon administration to make overtures to China in 1969. Yet as late as 2014 he was still asking direct questions. I think I can see how they got those assumptions so wrong.

The thing is, he is still making the same fundamental mistake. In perceiving the rise of a China as a new world leader, he is still thinking "they want to be just like us".

Indirectness is okay if you already have your core judgments set up. That's to say, I don't see how indirect questioning is functional if you don't already have a set of principles that are largely closed to discussion. I don't know what happens if the questioners and questionees don't then have at least some principles in common. Like for instance, decisions about how functional deception can be.