The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (I)

As we approach 20th century Chinese history the amount of research published in English increases dramatically. China’s contact with modernity was a violent and desperate affair. The structures and ideas upon which Chinese society had been built for centuries were torn to pieces in a few decades. The focus of every Chinese thinker and strategist during the subsequent ‘century of humiliation‘ (bainian guochi) was how to regain China’s prestige on the international stage and expel the foreign brutes who leached off of their nation’s wealth. Importantly, the humiliation forced upon the Chinese people was a humiliation decided by the force of arms in the midst of battle. China’s sovereignty could not be restored without amassing and using the power necessary to drive out the imperialists and vanquish rebellious warlords. This meant that, as was the case in the Warring States Era, any thinker worth his or her salt would ultimately have to articulate how his or her vision for China’s future lead to victory on the battlefield.

The difficulty scholars of strategic thought face trying to reconstruct the strategic theories of this era is that few writers or statesmen articulated matters in such harsh terms. Attempts to reconstruct the intellectual history of the era rarely take strategy as their focus, and are generally organized around topics like nationalism, democracy, modernization, and so forth. These topics were intimately related to strategy, and so a great deal about the strategic and grand strategic principles current in the era can be found inside these histories, but it is up to the enterprising reader to find these scattered details and piece them all together into one coherent picture. 

 Part of the problem is the way that military history in the closing days of the Qing and the Republican period has been treated. Endymion Wilikinson describes the general trend:

Writing on the war-lords, the civil wars, and the eight year anti-Japanese war tends to fall into one of two types. The first is campaign history, the second attempts to evaluate the military as a  political and social phenomenon and its effects on society and the economy. Much of the earlier work tended to fall into the first type, adopting a partisan framework, depending on whether the author was writing in a GMD or CCP context.

Given the passage of time and the wealth of new sources, it should now be possible to give warfare its rightful place at the forefront of modern Chinese history without feeling obliged immediately to take sides. As Diana Lary puts it in a slightly different way, “The Guomindang lost control of China because its armies lost, first to the Japanese, then to the Communists. The Communists came to power not because their ideology appealed to the people, but because their conventional (not guerrilla) armies triumphed in larger, set-piece battles. These are important correctives for a field in which the study of political systems and of ideology has loomed much larger than the study of military history and the history of warfare. [16]

Harold Tanner makes a similar observation in a recent article on Lin Biao‘s Manchuria campaigns (1945-48):

[What] noted scholars have written about the political, economic, and social weaknesses of the Nationalist regime is valuable and relevant to understanding of why Chiang Kai-shek was defeated. What is unfortunate is that until recently the scholarship in these areas has been accompanied by a marginalization of military history. Those few books that did focus on the military history of the civil war never made it into the mainstream of academic discourse. As a result the question of why the Chinese civil war ended as it did was generally answered with little or no reference to fighting. The clash of arms was seen as a superficial manifestation that was fought out on the social and political levels and decided in the hearts and minds of the Chinese, not on any battlefield. [17]

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