The Chinese Strategic Tradition: A Research Program (II)

It is worth it to stop and remember the type of questions strategic theorists might be trying to find answers to if they turned their eye to a period of Chinese history like the Song. Some might be quite China-specific: if the Seven Military Classics advocate a consistent set of strategic principles (as some scholars argue they do) [5], is there evidence these principles guided the actual decisions made by Song dynasty statesmen or generals? Does China’s geography mean that all Chinese leaders inevitably share a specific set of strategic concerns and priorities (as other scholars have argued)? [6]  Some might be more general: are there universal patterns in the way states respond to or perceive rapid shifts in power (ala the Humiliation of Jingkang)? Is there a relationship between the autonomy  military commanders are allowed and a state’s ability to strike upon a successful strategy? How do states move from indecisive war to sustainable peace?

I could name more but I think this is sufficient to prove the point.  Song China could be easily used as a data point or a case study in research programs across the fields of strategic theory, security studies, and international relations. But before this can happen researchers need histories of the Song dynasty’s foreign policy and military campaigns that are easy to find and easy to understand without special training. Overviews are not enough, nor are descriptions of political institutions or structures sufficient. Strategic history is the study of decision-making. To understand how and why individual decisions were made, narrative histories are an absolute necessity.  Ideally the narratives would extend over entire wars or larger periods of peace, and would be detailed enough that scholars would not have to search through monographs and journal articles on unrelated topics in hopes of stumbling across the nuggets of information they need. [7]

A particular problem is a lack of what I call ‘mid range’ studies of Chinese military, diplomatic, and political history. There are a host of studies with a small and narrow focus, but as stated earlier, these episodes can be difficult to use in isolation. In contrast, there is also a large amount of research on fairly large topics and timescales–for example, the relationship between Chinese military strength and nomadic state formation on the Inner Asian steppe across Chinese history. This is another line of research that began with controversies outside of Sinology proper.  First debated by anthropologists and archeologists who studied nomadic pastoralists, the central question in dispute is how a society with resources as diffuse and social hierarchies as unstable as those seen in nomadic societies could ever create a power structure strong enough to create lasting empires and confederations (like the Mongol Empire). The controversy quickly spilled into Chinese history, as it was on the Chinese frontier the greatest of these empires were always born, and some have hypothesized that it was interference from the Chinese on the Inner Asian steppe that created them. Whether or not this hypothesis is true is a question hotly debated. To address it, entire books have since been written describing the patterns and logic of Sino-nomadic relations, many of which cover the entire scope of Chinese history. [8] This type of research leads to sweeping conclusions that are usually quite valuable, but also usually quite difficult to test, for many of the mid range studies describing how individual dynasties dealt with the nomads have yet to be written.

Prioritizing what to write first is a difficult task. China has had a long history. Over the course of this history Chinese generals, rebels, kings, and statesmen have waged innumerable wars. Some of these wars are more important than others, however, and the list of wars that play a prominent place in the Chinese historical imagination is manageable. Individual lists will differ, but I would say that the conflicts discussed most in China’s strategic literature and portrayed most often in contemporary Chinese pop culture include:

• The Han-Chu contention (206-202 BC)

• The Han Xiongnu Wars (133-53 BC)

• The Wars of the Three Kingdoms (220-280 AD)

Page 5 of 16 | Previous page | Next page