The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (I)
What united this Realist Confucian ‘school’ with the Legalists who took credit for Qin’s rise was their utter disdain for those relied on generalship, deception, and operational maneuver for victory. This could win battles but could never win wars–much less conquer the world. More important than strategic skill was the ruler’s ability to mobilize and organize resources for war; victory went not to the swift, nor to the smart, nor to those with best shi (?), but to the kingdoms who could outlast and exhaust their enemy or steal the support of their population and officials. Realist Confucians like Xunzi, Lu Jia, and Jia Yi had very different ideas about how to do this than Legalists like the authors of the Book of Lord Shang or Han Feizi did, but their critique of the bingfa literature was in this respect quite similar.
[8] Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 636-643, has a useful summary of these works and their subsequent influence on later Chinese thought and politics.
[9] For one example, see Mao Zedong, “Problems of Strategy in China’s Revolutionary War,” ch. V, part 3 (December 1936), published in Selected Military Writings of Mao Tse-tung. On the influence Water Margin had on Mao’s thought in general, see Stuart Scrahm, Mao Tse-tung (New York: Pelican Books, 1967), 21, 43-44, 128, 159.
[10] ??? (Wu Yiting), “????????????????” [Brief Analysis of the Types of Stratagems in Three Kingdoms], Journal of Harbin University 23, no 4 (2002).
[11] One notable exception is Peter Moddy, “The Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Popular Chinese Political Thought” The Review of Politics, 37, No. 2 (1975), 175-199. For what it is worth, this essay is the best analysis of the novel I have read in English, and I have read many.
[12] I speculate that the difference in focus seen between the scholarship of ancient China and that of mid and late imperial China reflects the dominance of linguists and philologists in the field of early China studies; rarely does their interest in rhetoric or philology extend any closer to the present than the language used by famed poets of the Tang Dynasty.
[13] Books and articles on Wei Yuan include: Jane Kate Leonard, Wei Yuan and China’s Rediscovery of the Maritime World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983); Wang Chia-chien, A Chronological Biography of Wei Yuan (Taipei: Academia Sinica, 1967); Peter M. Mitchell, “The Limits of Reformism: Wei Yuan’s Reaction to Western Intrusion,” Modern Asian Studies 6, no. 2 (1972), 175–204; Philip Kuhn, “The Ideas Behind China’s Modern State,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 55, no 2 (1995), 295-337.
Page 13 of 15 | Previous page | Next page