Sun Tzu and the Chinese Military Mind

Sun Tzu’s short work on ancient Chinese strategy, The Art of War, remains one of the world’s most quoted books, with multiple English-language translations available. Not only is The Art of War marketed as a guide for aspiring military commanders seeking success, it is also widely used in business and industry as a primer for executives seeking to practise competitive marketing strategy. In modern sport, Sun Tzu is a guru for coaches from many sports—most famously perhaps, Brazil’s 2002 World Cup soccer coach, Luiz Felipe Scolari, who claimed that in the march to victory he planned his match strategy according to Sun Tzu’s ideas.

The ancient Chinese sage is also an occasional favourite of Hollywood, notably in Oliver Stone’s 1987 film Wall Street and in the Mafia television series The Sopranos. In Wall Street, the corporate raider Gordon Gekko, played by Michael Douglas, outlines his ruthless strategy of financial speculation when he pronounces, “I don’t throw darts at a board. I bet on sure things. Read Sun Tzu, The Art of War. Every battle is won before it is ever fought.” Later in the film, Gekko’s corporate protégé, Budd Fox, played by Charlie Sheen, paraphrases Sun Tzu: “If your enemy is superior, evade him. If angry, irritate him. If equally matched, fight, and if not split and re-evaluate.”

In The Sopranos, the Mafia under-boss, Tony Soprano, meditating on gangster strategy, muses on the value of The Art of War: “At first I thought it [the book] was just common sense, but if you pay attention to what he’s saying, here’s a guy, a Chinese general, who wrote this thing 2400 years ago, and … hey, most of it still applies today.” In the world of global T-shirt marketing featuring images or sayings of military figures, Sun Tzu probably ranks only behind Che Guevara in popularity.

Even feminists are not immune to the charm of the great Chinese sage. In 2002, Sun Tzu’s book was portrayed as a New Age tract for ambitious career women by Ching Ning-chu in her book The Art of War for Women: Sun Tzu’s Ancient Strategies and Wisdom for Winning at Work. A recent Google search reveals a photograph of the American socialite Paris Hilton studying Sun Tzu’s The Art of War intently, accompanied by a delicious caption in which the clearly perplexed Ms Hilton muses, “I wonder when it gets to the bit about suing the sun?” If we could bring Sun Tzu back from the dead, the Chinese sage would probably be quickly booked for a prime-time television reprise of Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.

The difficulty with all of this popular exposure is that Sun Tzu, while much quoted, is seldom understood, nor is the context of his strategic work correctly appreciated. The Art of War has been reduced to a military or corporate cookbook, with its poetic content used indiscriminately to adorn military doctrine manuals, generals’ speeches and corporate executive portfolios. All of this would have bewildered Sun Tzu who was, after all, a Taoist philosopher from ancient China who wrote professionally on war with the utmost seriousness during the era known as the Warring States period, some 2500 years ago—a time of enormous civil strife with huge armies contending for power in what is today modern China.

What then is the intellectual relevance of Sun Tzu to the world of twenty-first-century military affairs? Is it possible to place the thought of this ancient Chinese strategic thinker into its proper context? And does he have anything to teach the statesmen and strategists of the West about the rise of contemporary China? This essay seeks to answer these questions by two approaches. First, it explores the background to, and the content of, The Art of War and examines its distinctive ideas many of which differ sharply from Western ideas of strategy. Second, it outlines the reasons why Sun Tzu remains of compelling relevance to the study of strategy in general, and to the military rise of modern China in particular. 

The Sun-Tzu bin fa—to give The Art of War its proper name—dates from between 403 and 221 BC and is the longest-existing, most philosophically developed and most widely studied military classic in human history. We know little about Sun Tzu as a historical figure except that he appears to have lived in the fourth century BC and was a general of the kingdom of Wu and successfully led armies in battle.

During the Song dynasty of the eleventh century AD, most of China’s ancient military texts were gathered into The Seven Military Classics, and at the centre of this compilation is Sun Tzu’s book. Although The Art of War is short and appears simple to read compared to that other, and much longer, classic of military philosophy, Carl von Clausewitz’s On War, Sun Tzu’s work is actually more difficult to understand for Westerners. This is because The Art of War is not a systematic analysis of the phenomena of war and strategy but rather a set of aphorisms rooted in Chinese culture and Taoist (the Way) philosophical method—a method which makes strong use of paradox and metaphors—in a manner that is often alien to the Western mind.

To quote the Chinese military writer Chen-Ya Tien, author of the 1992 book Chinese Military Theory: Ancient and Modern: 

a comprehensive study of the ancient Chinese art of war is almost impossible without touching on the traditional Chinese political philosophies or value systems … Therefore, to some degree, one inevitably refers to political philosophy when discussing Chinese military theories.  

For these reasons, one of the most sophisticated Western military theorists, the late Michael Handel, in the 2002 edition of his book Masters of War: Classical Strategic Thought, observes that those who think that Sun Tzu is easier to comprehend than Clausewitz are intellectually deluded: 

Sun Tzu’s The Art of War may seem easier on first reading but it is actually more difficult to understand in depth—while Clausewitz’s On War is initially more difficult to read, but is actually easier to comprehend if perused carefully.  

Sun Tzu’s book provides the basic text of what might be called the Sinic or East Asian tradition of war and strategy, which is the only serious challenger to the global dominance of the Western tradition. The Sinic tradition gave the military world the crossbow, gunpowder and cast iron; the first staff organisation; and it invented paper and printing for transmitting orders. There is, however, a great paradox with these innovations because in traditional Chinese philosophy, the practice of warfare is not celebrated or glorified as it is in the West. There is no ancient Chinese martial epic such as The Iliad; there are no Alexanders, Caesars and Napoleons in the Chinese pantheon of national greatness; and there is no Chinese equivalent of the Elysian Fields or Valhalla where the spirits of dead warriors travel to feast with the gods.

Order and harmony are the two great Chinese social virtues, and these virtues are found not in those who bear arms but in civil affairs—in Confucian scholars and legalists, bureaucratic mandarins and Taoist philosophers. Indeed, war is regarded with such distaste that in 1971 Professor Lei Bailun, surveying the Middle Kingdom’s history from ancient times to the early twentieth century, described China as being “a culture without soldiers”—by which he meant that China has always lacked a significant military class on the lines of the Roman aristocracy, the Prussian junkers or the Japanese samurai. The French scholar Francois Jullien, writing in 2004, observes, “Chinese strategy is not concerned with glory and is wary of heroism. Or rather, strategy is, in principle, non-heroic; it must not be heroic.”

How then can we understand Sun Tzu as a military strategist? There are two essentials to consider. First, we must examine his use of the Taoist method of paradox to teach strategy; and second, we must look at his complex philosophy of war, which revolves around the uses of deception, surprise and intelligence. 

The Art of War is replete with Taoist paradoxes. Indeed, it is that ultimate paradox—a military treatise with a fundamental distaste for warfare. When Sun Tzu looks for the mark of the good general he tells us that the commander who seeks to restore harmony and order and does not seek personal glory by battle, the one who wins by use of minimum force and who seeks to preserve strength, “is the state’s treasure”. Sun Tzu strongly advises that, unless one is endangered, it is folly to engage in warfare because “a vanquished state cannot be revived; the dead cannot be brought back to life”. When a state is forced to fight, its aim must be to achieve maximum results with minimum risk, limiting as far as possible the destruction to be inflicted and suffered, always fighting with the aim of preservation rather than destruction. The best commanders combine the virtues of wisdom, credibility, benevolence, courage and strictness with a philosophy of military restraint. This approach is reflected in the Chinese sage’s famous injunction: “attaining one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the pinnacle of excellence. Subjugating the enemy’s army without fighting is the true pinnacle of excellence.”

Sun Tzu’s distaste for organised violence explains much of the distinctive content of The Art of War, which largely concerns another paradoxical question: how does an enlightened ruler achieve victory in war at minimum cost in treasure and human bloodshed to the state or even without the use of force? This leads Sun Tzu to develop a holistic or total approach to war emphasising statecraft through combining strategy, politics, diplomacy, finance and alliances with military operations. There is yet another paradox here: Sun Tzu teaches us that in order to keep war limited we first must make it total by employing the economic, political and diplomatic spheres as force multipliers to, or controllers of, military action. As Michael Handel observes, “for Sun Tzu, diplomacy and war are not just closely related—they comprise a continuous, seamless activity”.

In many ways, then, Sun Tzu is strikingly modern. He is the world’s first “whole-of-government” strategist, an early manifestation of the grand or national security strategist. He is the first strategic thinker to place an emphasis on co-ordination and on non-military means and the use of statecraft in war to achieve aims by coercion as well as combat. As he writes, “the highest realisation of warfare is to attack the enemy’s plans; next is to attack their alliances; next to attack their army; and the lowest is to attack their fortified cities”. In short, the able strategist brings all the state’s resources, military and non-military together in a unified effort to achieve victory as quickly and as efficiently as possible.

As Henry Kissinger notes in his recent book On China, what distinguishes Sun Tzu from most Western writers on strategy is his belief that the unity of psychological and political elements is more important than an emphasis on military factors in war. This holistic approach to war means there is an enormous emphasis in The Art of War on the role of stratagem: that is, on the practice of deception and the use of surprise and intelligence operations. As Sun Tzu puts it, “warfare is the Way (Tao) of deception” and, “one who knows the enemy and knows himself will not be endangered in a hundred engagements”. Thus, in Sun Tzu we find the roles of deception and espionage elevated to the heights of grand strategy in a way we do not find in Clausewitz and other Western military theorists.

Yet another paradox in Sun Tzu’s book is the notion that preserving the enemy state is better than destroying it. His definition of victory is one of achieving success without undue cost. One should use coercion over force whenever possible. The use of restraint, avoidance of escalation, not seeking to humiliate the enemy and above all, trying to evade an exhausting struggle are all themes that run through The Art of War. In chapter two, and in sharp contrast to Mao Zedong, he warns: “no country has ever profited from protracted war”. Preserving one’s strength through the harmony of a balance of power is far easier than seeking hegemony, for ultimately no war can ever bring total security; at best one achieves only a better kind of insecurity. Sun Tzu is therefore careful to warn against unnecessary and costly battles. As he puts it, “in general, the method for employing the military is this: Preserving the [enemy’s] state capital is best, destroying their state capital second-best. Preserving their army is best, destroying their army second-best.”

The very first lines of The Art of War proclaim the seriousness of Sun Tzu: “warfare is the greatest affair of state, the basis of life and death, the Way to survival or extinction. It must be thoroughly pondered and analysed.” He goes on to identify five constant factors in war: moral law; weather; terrain; the commander; and organisation. They are used as a basis for comparison with seven other elements: which ruler embodies moral law better; which general is more able in the field; which army obtains the greater advantages from nature and the terrain; which side is better organised; which troops are stronger; which side has the better officers and men; and which army is more enlightened or knowledgeable. The interplay of these factors and elements are constant themes throughout Sun Tzu’s writing. Mastery of them determines victory or defeat. From their combination, we can deduce from them five main principles for waging successful war that are present throughout The Art of War—the use of deception; the quest for advantage from strategic configuration; the use of manoeuvre; the importance of understanding terrain and tactics; and the vital role of espionage. 

In chapter one of The Art of War, Sun Tzu tells us that war is based on deception; of constantly creating false appearances, spreading disinformation and employing trickery. When strategy is imaginatively created and effectively implemented, the enemy will neither know where to attack nor what formations to employ, and will be condemned to making fatal errors. As Sun Tzu puts it: 

Warfare is the Way (Tao) of deception. Thus although you are capable, display incapability to them [the enemy]. When committed to employing your forces, feign incapacity. When your objective is nearby, make it appear as if distant; when far away, create the illusion of being nearby. Display profits to entice them; create disorder [in their forces] and take them. If they are substantial prepare for them; if they are strong avoid them. If they are angry perturb them … If they are united, cause them to be separated. Attack where they [enemies] are unprepared. Go forth where they will not expect it. These are the ways military strategists are victorious. 

Sun Tzu goes on to state that war is concerned with one thing: the relentless search for exploitable strategic advantage. In this quest “the army is established by deceit. [It] moves from advantage and changes through segmenting and reuniting.” The good strategist conceals strength and exhibits the coyness of a maiden until the enemy gives him an opening; at which point he assumes the rapidity of a running hare, throwing the adversary off balance. For Sun Tzu war is as much psychological as physical, with the aim to create disharmony and chaos, to deceive the enemy in order to ensure that when the test of arms comes, one can proceed with confidence.

Again, we see the use of paradox and opposites in the application of Taoist thought to strategy. Sun Tzu’s focus on deception leads him to emphasise the intangibles of war: surprise, intelligence, manoeuvre, flexibility, high tempo and speed to achieve victory. The conduct, or Tao of warfare, based on deception sees Sun Tzu isolate combat into five areas of rational assessment: measurement of space; estimation of quantities; calculations of when to fight; comparisons of forces; and chances of victory. Assessing these factors against a background of deception serves as a kind of early form of what military establishments call today “net assessment” of force and strength ratios. For Sun Tzu, rational assessment of relevant factors permits an estimation of comparative strength and weakness, for “if you know them [the army] and yourself, your victory will not be imperilled. If you know Heaven and know Earth, your victory can be complete.”  

The key idea in Sun Tzu is the quest for a favourable disposition that will yield advantage from a configuration of strategic power that is known as shih (power) which in turn is connected to form, or strategic disposition or the use of deployment, known as hsing (form). The interplay of power with form is absolutely critical to Sun Tzu’s thinking. As he puts it, achieving strategic advantage (shih) is comparable in its effect to boulders crashing down a thousand-fathom mountain. As the scholars Edward O’Dowd and Arthur Waldron write: 

The strategist, according to Sun Tzu, is engaged in a dynamic process with the enemy … An important component of this process is the ability to determine the enemy’s dispositions (hsing) and potential power (shih). At the same time, the competent strategist conceals his own hsing-shih from the enemy. 

In The Art of War, achieving strategic advantage (shih) from military disposition (hsing) requires the operational skill of balancing unorthodox (ch’i) and orthodox (cheng) tactics, whose relationship is like an inexhaustible cycle of interactions. The interplay and correlation between exploiting strategic advantage from military disposition involves the greatest skill in operational strategy. It involves translating the concepts of shih and hsing into operations by using the tactics of the unorthodox and the orthodox which are circular and interlocked. Sun Tzu argues that: 

In battle it is best to engage with the orthodox and then gain victory through the unorthodox. Thus one who excels at sending forth the unorthodox is as inexhaustible as Heaven, as unlimited as the Yangtze and Yellow rivers.  

Thus, ch’i and cheng are tactical conceptualisations that draw once again on the Taoist concept of paradox, in this case the yin and yang or the reversion of opposites. In his well-known 1963 translation of The Art of War, Brigadier General Samuel Griffith of the US Marine Corps suggests that Sun Tzu’s orthodox or cheng force is the direct force used to fix an enemy while the unorthodox or ch’i force is the manoeuvre force of decision which combines flexibility, speed and combat power. There is no doubt that, for Sun Tzu, strategic advantage comes from good operational disposition, which is then exploited by combining the tactics that stem from the direct and the indirect dialectic in war. As Sun Tzu writes, “the one who first understands the tactics of the circuitous and the direct will be victorious. This is the strategy of military combat.” Military power is compared to the flow of water and has no constant form. Similarly, strategy, operations and tactics are always in constant fluid motion: “an army does not have fixed strategic advantages (shih) or an invariable position (hsing)”.

The true aim of the strategist is to achieve a situation in which stratagem appears formless through positioning (hsing) and this then translates into complete power or military advantage (shih) in the field. As Sun Tzu puts it, “the ultimate skill in taking up strategic position (hsing) is to have no form (hsing)”. This facilitates what he calls “the battle of the expert” in which one confronts an enemy that has already lost through what the sinologist Frank Kiernan describes as Sun Tzu’s “exaltation of the extraordinary stratagem”. 

For Sun Tzu, deception, strategic advantage, the use of formless positioning and the stress he places on the interplay of the unorthodox and orthodox—that complex mixture of the concepts of shih, hsing, ch’i and cheng—facilitate what Western military thinkers would today style as a “manoeuvrist approach” to warfare. Although it would be wrong to suggest as some scholars have done that Sun Tzu is an original manoeuvre strategist, he clearly understands through his concepts of shih, hsing, ch’i and cheng that the unorthodox manoeuvre is a valuable feature in the continuum of warfare.

Accordingly, Sun Tzu stresses fluidity, speed and tempo. As he puts it, “it is the nature of the army to stress speed”. The commander who excels in attack confuses the enemy; he is subtle and “approaches the formless”, the unfathomable, through his dispositions and movements and so becomes the “enemy’s Master of Fate”, the regulator of victory and defeat. The victorious army first searches for a shaping strategy in which it determines “the conditions for victory”; it is unfathomable in forming its strategy and only seeks to engage in battle when the enemy is placed in an unfavourable position. In calm order it awaits the disordered and “one who excels at moving the enemy deploys in a configuration to which the enemy must respond … With profit he moves them; with the foundation he awaits them.” In contrast, the vanquished army, because it lacks skill and foreknowledge of its adversary, will tend to fight first, and seek victory in the deadly heat of combat.

Infinite variation and flexibility are the keys to manipulating conditions to achieve a successful configuration of strategic power (shih). Fluidity and change are vital, for as Sun Tzu tells us, “a victorious battle [strategy] is not repeated, [because] the configurations (hsing) of response [to the enemy] are inexhaustible”. The good commander seeks to determine the enemy’s disposition of forces without revealing his own perceptible shape or form. This approach allows the able general to conceal movement and to manoeuvre to concentrate while the enemy is fragmented, and then defeat him in detail.

In chapter six of The Art of War, Sun Tzu concentrates on how effective warfare always deals with what he calls attacks on the enemy’s “vacuity and substance”—in other words assaulting the adversary’s vulnerabilities. The key factor in manoeuvring forces in war is always to appear formless. Sun Tzu compares the skilful commander’s mastery of formless movement to the flow of water across ground. As he puts it: 

As water configures (hsing) its flow in accordance with the terrain; the army controls its victory in accord with the enemy. Thus the army does not maintain any constant strategic configuration of power (shih), [and] water has no constant shape (hsing).  

In Sun Tzu’s thirteen-chapter book, four chapters are on terrain. Sun Tzu is the world’s topographical strategist par excellence. Understanding the use of ground is the basis for all movement and for assessing force ratios. As he writes: 

Terrain gives birth to measurement; measurement produces the estimation [of forces]. Estimation [of forces] gives rise to calculating [the numbers of men]. Calculating [the numbers of men] gives rise to weighing [strength]. Weighing [strength] gives birth to victory.  

In strategy, knowledge of the typology of different terrains is fundamental to the art of strategy. Sun Tzu calls for mastery of “nine terrains”: dispersive, light, contentious, traversable, focal, heavy, entrapping, encircled and fatal. Dispersive terrain is one’s own terrain, where one should avoid engagements. Light terrain is enemy ground that is penetrated in shallow manner and one should not stay on it. Contentious terrain is advantageous ground and one should use it for defence rather than attack. Traversable terrain can favour either side and one should avoid becoming isolated on it. Focal terrain is land that favours the side that makes early occupation and should be used to unite with military allies. Heavy terrain is deeply penetrated enemy terrain, which should be plundered for provisions. Entrapping terrain such as mountains or forests is highly dangerous and should be crossed quickly. Constricted ground that renders an army vulnerable is encircled terrain and requires the use of skilled strategy. Finally, ground where one is forced to fight for survival is fatal terrain, in which one has no option but to give battle.

A general searching for shih and hsing (power and form) and employing troops in ch’i and cheng operations across these nine types of terrain require a deadly skill that Sun Tzu compares to that of an agile and lethal mountain snake, the shuaijan: 

Thus one who excels at employing the army may be compared to the shuaijan … If you strike its head the tail will respond; if you strike its tail the head will respond. If you strike the middle [of the body] both the head and tail will react. 

A successful army must be like the shuaijan, capable of understanding the ground it is upon and skilled in flexible counter-attack. A good general must understand “the Tao of terrain” and how the different configurations of terrain can condition a campaign. 

Sun Tzu states that the means by which enlightened rulers and sagacious generals succeed is through spies with advance knowledge, or in modern parlance through espionage and intelligence. As he puts it, in armies “no relationship is closer than with spies; no rewards are more generous than those given to spies, no affairs more secret than those pertaining to spies”. Espionage is seen as vital to the conduct of war. Intelligence operations require five types of spies or agents: local spies; internal spies; turned spies (double agents); dead (expendable) spies; and living spies. When all five types are employed together they yield vital information and contribute to the ability to spread disinformation and propaganda among the enemy.

If one knows the Tao of the five methods of espionage then it becomes a “spiritual methodology” that the sagacious general and enlightened ruler can use with great profit, because intelligence “is the essence of the military, what the [the army] relies on to move”. The successful prosecution of military affairs lies in learning in detail the enemy’s intentions. As Michael Handel notes, in order to reduce uncertainty, “throughout The Art of War, Sun Tzu reiterates that the continuous use of intelligence is essential because it provides more accurate insights into the enemy’s mind, intentions, and capabilities as well as into his estimates of one’s own dispositions and plans”. Sun Tzu advises “according with an enemy” by which he means gaining foreknowledge of the enemy based on intelligence. Adaptability is a key virtue and thus, “do not fix any time for battle, assess and react to the enemy in order to determine the strategy for battle”. 

In 1963, the British military thinker Basil Liddell Hart wrote: 

[The writings of Sun Tzu] might well be termed the concentrated essence of wisdom on the conduct of war. Among all the military thinkers of the past, only Clausewitz is comparable, and even he is more “dated” than Sun Tzu, and in part antiquated, although he was writing more than two thousand years later. Sun Tzu has clearer vision, more profound insight, and eternal freshness.  

Sun Tzu certainly has a strong modern appeal. Michael Handel argues in Masters of War that Sun Tzu’s concept of the strategic configuration of power, the shih concept, is an important and original contribution to the study of war. Handel suggests that while Clausewitz compared war to a game of cards, and Jomini to chess, for Sun Tzu it resembles the Chinese game of Wei-chi or go. Unlike cards and chess where there are sudden death outcomes, Wei-chi is a painstaking game based on protracted movements involving the steady encirclement of an opponent in which the skills of patience and deception are paramount. In Handel’s view, Sun Tzu would have disliked flamboyant and risk-taking Western commanders such as Hannibal, Robert E. Lee and Erwin Rommel but would have probably approved of the patient and meticulous Fabius, Ulysses S. Grant and Bernard Montgomery.

In the twentieth century, Sun Tzu’s writings influenced the Japanese generals who swept through South-East Asia during the Second World War. The great Chinese thinker was a major influence on Mao Zedong and, later, on the Vietnamese strategist General Vo Nguyen Giap. One only has to read Mao’s Selected Military Writings with their emphasis on deception, destroying enemy will and the elevation of the human factor in war to realise his debt to Sun Tzu. Contrary to much popular belief, however, Mao did not derive his theory of protracted warfare from Su Tzu but rather from Clausewitz’s meditations in On War on the role of the “people-in-arms” in defeating Napoleon in Europe. General Giap, conqueror of the French army at Dien Bien Phu, was another keen student of Sun Tzu whom, alongside T.E. Lawrence’s The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he studied with meticulous care.

In the West, Liddell Hart became initially the best-known devotee of Sun Tzu and adapted many of the latter’s teachings to his own concept of “the strategy of the indirect approach”. In the 1970s and 1980s, in the wake of US defeat in Vietnam, the American Military Reform Movement, led by such figures as William Lind and Gary Hart, adopted Sun Tzu as one of its gurus of manoeuvre warfare. Proponents of military reform in the USA claimed that an ignorance of the teachings of Sun Tzu had contributed to American disaster in the rice paddies of South-East Asia.

Today, Sun Tzu’s emphasis on the unity of war and statecraft, his teachings on disposition, deception, dislocation, manoeuvre and intelligence have great resonance in an era dominated by globalised information networks, precision munitions and stealth technologies. Not surprisingly, American information warfare thinkers such as Admirals William Owens and the late Arthur Cebrowski have acknowledged the importance of Sun Tzu’s influence on their writings. However, the contemporary strategist who most symbolised the intellectual legacy of Sun Tzu is the late John Boyd, the brilliant American air strategist who created the fast-decision “observe, orientate, decide, act” cycle (OODA Loop) that is now central to Western operational strategy. Boyd, a great admirer of Sun Tzu, earned the ultimate accolade of “the American Sun Tzu”. As Frans Osinga points out in his book Strategy, Science and War, “Boyd’s work resembles The Art of War. There are similarities in the prime role of information accorded to strategy, to the role of perception … to the importance of tempo, surprise, novelty and mismatches, and the use of cheng/ch’i”.

Sun Tzu continues to be studied by Chinese military professionals. For example, in 1987, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officer, General Tao Hanzhang produced Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: The Modern Chinese Interpretation. In 1998, Defence Minister Chi Haotian stated, “the basic law of wars exposed by Sun Tzu’s works and its principles could be an important guidance even to modern wars using high tech weapons”. Some Western theorists have also traced the contents of an influential Chinese tract from the late 1990s, Unrestricted Warfare by two PLA colonels, to Sun Tzu’s teachings. Various writers on grand strategy have also detected the pervasive influence of Sun Tzu in modern Chinese statecraft. In his 2010 book, The Mind of Empire: China’s History and Modern Foreign Relations, the American scholar Christopher A. Ford notes that the most striking aspect of modern Chinese strategic thought is the inspiration it draws from the ancient Warring States period out of which Sun Tzu’s book originally emerged. Similarly, Kissinger’s masterly tome On China refers to the enduring relevance of “the Chinese style of Sun Tzu strategy” as practised by Beijing’s modern leaders from Mao Zedong through Jiang Zemin to Hu Jintao. 

Sun Tzu may have been a Taoist philosopher and Confucian idealist who disliked the necessity for armed violence but, ironically, he left to posterity a book which is a major example of the study of war for praxis. There is little doubt that The Art of War represents the essence of a distinct Chinese approach to war complete with its philosophy of paradox and its holistic approach to strategy. Sun Tzu is always easy to read because he is admirably concise, writes poetically and often uses striking metaphors. Yet, in order to understand the Chinese sage properly, the discerning reader must move beyond the quotations so beloved of today’s Western business manuals and television marketing. Instead, those who seek to grasp the subtlety of Chinese strategy as articulated in the Sun-Tzu bin fa must penetrate deep into Taoist and Confucian philosophy as well as Chinese history. Most who read The Art of War today in the West seldom bother to undertake this intellectual labour and so contribute to the trivialisation of a great Asian thinker.

Sun Tzu’s ideas on deception, strategic configuration, manoeuvre, and the uses of terrain and the role of espionage—not to mention his “whole-of-government” approach to strategy—mark him as arguably the world’s greatest military philosopher after the Prussian master, Carl von Clausewitz. While no modern nation’s destiny can ever be captive to ancient historical precedent, the task of understanding a nation’s past is the beginning of wisdom. This is particularly the case with any appreciation of the Middle Kingdom with its unique and unbroken civilisation stretching back into the mists of antiquity. Because of its long and rich history, modern China has a powerful sense of cultural exceptionalism which extends deep into the realm of military strategy and statecraft. Sun Tzu’s enduring writings are central to any Western comprehension of this cultural exceptionalism and provide essential reading for all those who seek a better understanding of China’s rise to global eminence in the new millennium. 

Dr Michael Evans is the ADC Fellow at the Australian Defence College, Canberra.