The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (I)
[4] I would include among the best of these Derek Yuen, Deciphering Sun Tzu: How to Read The Art of War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Victor Mair’s recent translation and attached commentary, The Art of War: Sun Zi’s Military Methods (Translations from the Asian Classics) (Columbia: Columbia University Press, 2009); Andrew Seth Meyer, “Introduction,” in The Dao of the Military: Liu An’s Art of War, trans. Andrew Seth Meyer and John S. Major (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 4-20. I blogged about (and excerpted heavily from) the last of these articles here.
[5] – For example, Xunzi 15.
[6] Notable exceptions include Thomas Kane, Ancient China on Postmodern War: Enduring Ideas from the Chinese Strategic Tradition (Cass Military Studies) (New York: Routledge, 2014); Hans-Greg Moeller, The Philosophy of the Dao De Jing (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 54-87; and Derek Yuen’s chapter on the Dao De Jing in Deciphering Sun Tzu, 65-99. Those willing to dig into dissertation territory may also benefit from reading Christopher Rand,”The Role of Military Thought in Early Chinese Intellectual History,”PhD diss, Harvard University, 1977.
[7] I wish I could say this was a controversial point in the literature, but it is not, for there is no literature to speak of. Of the small bit of attention the conquests of Qin has received by scholars, the general consensus follows the traditional explanation that their success can be attributed to ‘legalist’ economic and social regime that welded that empire together. While folks like Steven Sage would like to expand this narrative to include additional factors, no one argues that the Qin’s success was primarily or even partially the result of strategic genius or superior operational art.
The success of Han Gaozu after the collapse of the short lived Qin empire has received even less attention. I have only found one article that even attempts to address why Han Gaozu was more successful than his enemy Xiang Yu (See Wang Aihe’s “Creators of Emperor: The Political Group Behind the Founding of the Han Dynasty,” Asia Major 14, no. 1 [2001], 19-51) and have looked in vain for a serious treatment of the Han-Chu contention anywhere. It was widely acknowledged during the war that Han Gaozu was neither as good a warrior nor as brilliant a strategist as his opponent, and Gaozu did not attribute his success to his military methods (bingfa). The most famous theory for his victory was proposed early in the the early first century in an essay by Jia Yi titled, “The Faults of Qin,” which not only sought to explain why Gaozu triumphed over Xiang Yu, but why the Qin could conquer the world but not maintain their conquests for more than a decade. It is an excellent example of what I call the “Realist-Confucian” school of strategic thought.
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