The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (I)

 China’s literary heritage, especially the great classical novels, is a another source of strategic insight, to a degree which is perhaps unique to China. After the close of the Warring States era and the rise of the scholar-bureaucracy in the mid Western Han dynasty (206 BC-9 AD), the social distinction between civil (wen) and martial (wu) grew very sharp and it became less fashionable for the philosophically inclined to discourse on the principles of war. Popular interest in the topic remained, however, and the demand to meet this interest was eventually filled by story-tellers, playwrights, and novelists. The great classical novels are the cream of this crop, hailed with the literary acclaim Westerners give The Illiad, but with the pop-culture presence of The Lord of the Rings.  Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-tung) famously cited examples from the classic Ming Dynasty (1368-1664) adventure novel, Shui Hu Zhuan (old style: Shui-hu Chuan, variously translated as Water Margin, Outlaws of the Marsh, or All Men Are Brothers) when describing his own ideas on strategy and warfare. [9] I am unaware of any attempt to find or list the strategic insights Mao claimed could be found in the novel, though I would not be surprised if a Chinese scholar has taken a stab at it. I have come across Chinese attempts to draw out and categorize the strategic principles found in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms (San Guo Yanyi, old style: San Kuo Yen-i) and cannot help but laud the effort. [10] Romance of the Three Kingdoms is the source of many of the recurring idioms and concepts of the Chinese strategic tradition (e.g. kong cheng ji, “the empty fortress ruse“) and of all texts associated with the tradition it is probably the one that can claim greatest popularity and widest exposure across all sections of Chinese society in contemporary times. These novels portray popular attitudes towards war and strategy with an openness more dignified genres never could, and for this reason alone they are worth serious study. Thus far this study has mostly been done by those with a background in Chinese literature; unsurprisingly they have analyzed the novels in literary, not strategic, terms. [11]

This brings us to the development of strategic thought in mid to late imperial China (defined here as 960-1912 AD). Though discourses on war were not as popular with the great Neo-confucian thinkers of late imperial times as they were with their ancient predecessors, history did not stop when Neo-confucianism rose ascendant. China still faced external security threats and the specter of internal rebellion. Literati involved in government–and at this time those who governed were almost all literati–still had to face the harsh questions of strategy. Their writings in response to these challenges could be quite voluminous. Strategic theory in late imperial times was most often expressed in what today we might call ‘grand strategic’ terms, with a focus on the social and economic basis of state power. These are the aspects of power with which mandarins living far from the frontier were most familiar with, and they were safely within the sphere of the ‘civil.’ There is a temptation to fault these men for their relative neglect of operational art and campaign strategy, but I do not think this should count too much against them. The treatises and memorials they wrote were quite sophisticated (and seem even more so when compared to what was being written by medieval European contemporaries), and had a lasting impact on the course of Chinese statecraft.

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