The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (I)

The tendency to downplay men killed on the battlefield in favor of words used in pamphlets or speeches has (ironically) led intellectual historians to ignore the very ideas that had the greatest impact on the course of the wars: the strategic principles and theories used by the major combatants in their search for victory.

 This neglect of war and strategy as a central theme leads to disappointing omissions in downstream scholarship. For example, Orville Schell and John Delury devote only a single paragraph to the Northern Expedition in their otherwise excellent discussion of the political program and grand strategic thought of Chiang Kai-shek in their Wealth and Power: China’s Long March to the 21st Century. [18] The Northern Expedition was Chiang Kai-shek’s greatest accomplishment and the sole reason he was able to accomplish anything else. If there was a connection between Chiang’s attitudes toward power or the strategic principles he cherished and his most successful military campaign the reader would never know it.

 The failure to address strategic thought is a weak thread in many historical narratives surrounding the period. Events like the  First Sino-Japanese War, the Boxer Rebellion, or the campaigns of the warlords are often treated as external events that catalyzed intellectual change. That individual military operations or even broader strategies can also be treated as the products of intellectual change–in other words, as the application of ideas on the battlefield–is foreign to most of the intellectual histories and many of the political histories written about the era. The few outliers–here I think of work done by folks like Arthur Waldron or Sarah C.M. Paine–tend to be from scholars with unusually strong backgrounds in strategic studies.

 The great exception to all of this is of course Mao Zedong. Mao considered himself a great thinker and theoretician, and the political importance of his works in later times would ensure that they received full translations into English. Partly because of this fact, and partly because the model of popular revolution he pioneered inspired communist revolutionaries across the world, Mao’s military works have become classics in Western military academies and have been put under intensive scrutiny by scholars of strategic theory. There are studies tracing Mao’s intellectual debt to Western strategic thought or contrasting him with major Western thinkers, studies applying his model to contemporary insurgencies, and studies dissecting his actual campaigns to better discern how theory translated into practice. The trend in the present scholarship is to expand the range of analysis past Mao to the other prominent leaders and generals of the CPC’s early days. The predictable result of such investigation is that Mao took much of the credit not only for the actions, but also for ideas and strategies, first proposed by his comrades. [19] Inasmuch as it helps us understand the dynamics of popular insurgencies and the development of the Chinese strategic tradition, this is an extremely useful line of research and I am pleased to see its progress.

 The literature on the development of Chinese strategic thought and doctrine during the next several decades after the death of Mao is similarly thorough, though the study of contemporary Chinese strategy presents some interesting problems. The first I have already touched on above: the extent to which the different strands of the Chinese tradition are acknowledged and used today. Another important question is how the process of strategy creation is understood and implemented at various levels of the PLA, PAP, and CPC. A third topic is whether there have been developments in strategic theory made by Chinese theorists capable of improving our own understanding of strategy, its creation, or its implementation.

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