The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (I)

The state of English scholarship on these men and their doctrines is opposite of the scholarship on ancient Chinese strategic thought. Here many books and articles dissecting their theories of statecraft and describing their policy proposals have been written, but there is a dearth of translated material. [12] Thus every book on the Song Dynasty (old style: Sung, 960-1279 AD) has a lengthy section on Wang Anshi‘s (d. 1086) political program, but there is no complete translation of the celebrated series of memorials in which he laid this program out. The same pattern extends right up to studies on the cusp on the modern era. Wei Yuan (d. 1858), perhaps the most seminal strategic theorist of Qing (Ch’ing, 1644-1912) China, has had several books or articles written about him and is a regular feature of general surveys of the dynasty. [13] However, neither his most famous work on statecraft, nor the famous anthology of writings he collected and published, The Collected Essays on Statecraft of the Great Qing (Huang-Qing Jingshi Wenbian), has been translated into English. Short excerpts from Wang Anshi, Wei Yuan, and the many theorists who lived between them can be found in books like Sources of the Chinese Tradition and China’s Response to the West: A Documentary Survey, but these are rarely more than a page or two long and are utterly insufficient for serious comparative study.

 Not all who wrote in late imperial times were establishment bureaucrats and scholars, and I hope the discussion above has not led you to think that the voices of true fighting men were silent during the last millennium of imperial history. Nothing could be further from the truth:  military works had never been written at a faster pace than during the final dynasties of imperial China. During the Song Dynasty wood-block printing went mainstream, making it possible to publish and distribute on a large scale without imperial patronage. As a result the number and type of sources that are available to us increased dramatically. [14] There were literally thousands of books on military science published during these centuries. Many of these were tactical manuals, describing how to repel besiegers, use gunpowder in battle, or drill men to move in formation. Others included first hand accounts of individual battles or campaigns, commentaries on existing military methods literature (especially the Seven Military Classics, which were canonized as such in the mid Song), and by the time of the late Ming, sprawling military encyclopedias.

 The greatest challenge facing researchers here is wading through the vast amount of available material to find the gems within it. From the cursory way these texts are treated in the secondary literature, one gets the impression that they were mostly records of tactical and technological advances. [15] Such material is the bread and butter of the military historian’s work, and a rigorous examination of their contents will likely be enough to end the ubiquitous blather about the indirect, “Eastern” way of war. Whether or not there were developments in strategic thought to match the advances in tactics and technology is a question still unanswered. The encyclopedias and treatises of these centuries are largely unexplored in Western scholarship, so it is quite possible that the military writers of the late imperial era were just as perceptive as their ancient and modern counterparts. But–at least for Anglophone scholars and readers–that still waits to be seen. I can think of few other examples where there is such a clear  abundance of source material yet such a desert of scholarship. This is an enormous scholarly field, and a potentially career building set of projects for many scholars.

Page 8 of 15 | Previous page | Next page