The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (II)

The only book I can think of that hits the sweet middle between these two extremes is David C. Wright‘s From War to Diplomatic Parity in Eleventh-Century China: Sung’s Foreign Relations with Kitan Liao , a 290 page history of Song-Liao relations, including the many wars the two powers fought in the Liao dynasty’s early days. Sadly, it also costs several hundred dollars, and lacking the prestige of the Cambridge History of China series, is far less likely to be in found in the average university library.  

The intrepid explorer of Song military history is thus relegated to sewing together bits and pieces of others works together until he has built up a coherent narrative in his head. The books he might use in this quest are quite varied:  obscure titles like John Chaffee‘s Branches of Heaven A History of the Imperial Clan of Sung China have a surprising amount of military narrative inside them; essay collections on Chinese military history (Warfare in Chinese History, Chinese Ways in Warfare, Debating War in Chinese History, Warfare in Inner Asian History, etc.) have many interesting descriptions and accounts of individual battles, campaigns, or foreign policy debates; a section of Patricia Ebray‘s biography of Song Huizong talks about military things, for being defeated by the Jurchen is one of the things Huizong did. The only study of Song military history as a whole that I have been able to find is an unpublished PhD dissertation from 1997.[4] Finding extra information past this means digging through journal articles, hunting down books no longer in print, and piecing together side details and foot-notes found in books on  Song economics, society or intellectual history, or on their traditional enemies and rivals, the Khitans, Jurchens, and Mongols.

It is possible I missed a title or two in this review–I freely admit that the Song dynasty is not my area of special expertise. But that is more or less the point. Finding and reading things about Chinese military strategy is what I do. We should not expect your average strategic studies or IR theorist with no background in Sinology to wade into this morass and pull out more than I have. If I have not been able to find it, odds of them finding it are even smaller.

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