The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (II)

The student who would like to know more about the military history of this era might start with Dieter Kuhn‘s  The Age of Confucian Rule: The Song Transformation of China, Frederick Mote’s Imperial China, 900-1800, or other generalist studies that try to integrate war and foreign relations with the economic, art, intellectual, social, and environmental histories of the era. Most of these books (Mote’s excepted) treat each of these subjects topically, and it is very difficult to grasp the flow of events–something necessary for those hoping to find connections between strategic theory and strategic practice–by reading them. To find a truly detailed and comprehensive narrative we must turn to the Cambridge History of China, the standard reference for Chinese political history from the ancient past to the modern age. The first thing one notices about this series is that each volume is incredibly expensive (+$170 a pop); the second is that the series is not finished yet. Volume V (published in two parts) concerns Song China. Part one is devoted to a detailed political narrative, the second to topical review essays. If the student has the money to buy the first part (or is lucky enough to have library access to it) and the fortitude to slog through its 1,100 pages, he will have acquired the background knowledge necessary to understand the political context behind Song military strategy. The second part has a fairly long essay devoted to the dynasty’s military history, but as it was only published two months ago (and several years after Wang wrote War and Harmony), I have not had the chance to read it and must abstain from judgement.

Those who would like smaller (or cheaper) summaries of China’s wars are in luck only if they can accept very small summaries. This is the type of thing you will find in Peter Lorge‘s War, Politics and Society in Early Modern China, 900-1795 , which by dint of the large time scale it covers can only offer a very condensed version of any one dynasty’s struggles. Books like China Among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and its Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries or Crisis and Prosperity in Sung China seem like they might provide the solution but in truth they are but a collection of individual essays on much narrower topics (e.g. “Barbarians or Northerners: Southern Sung Relations With the Khitans,” or “Sung Embassies: Some General Observations”). These essays are interesting and valuable, but most are so narrow in focus that those who do not already have a command of the literature have trouble knowing what this or that particular piece adds to the larger puzzle. The great majority of articles and book chapters on Song foreign policy or military history face one of these two problems: either they cover too much material in too condensed a form to provide proper case studies, or they cover topics so narrow that only those who specialize in the period can fully appreciate the importance of their arguments.

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