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It would be hard to overstate the impact of Sun Tzu's The Art of War on military thought. Beyond its impact in Asia, the work has been required reading in translation for US military personnel since the Cold War. Sun Tzu has been interpreted as arguing for 'Indirect Strategy' in contrast to 'Direct Strategy,' the latter idea stemming from Ancient Greece. This is a product of twentieth-century Western thinking, specifically that of Liddell Hart, who influenced Samuel B. Griffith's 1963 translation of Sun Tzu. The credibility of Griffith's translation was enhanced by his combat experience in the Pacific during World War II, and his translation of Mao Zedong's On Guerrilla War. This reading of Sun Tzu is, however, very different from Chinese interpretations. Western strategic thinkers have used Sun Tzu as a foil or facilitator for their own thinking, inadvertently engaging the Western military tradition and propagating misleading generalizations about Chinese warfare.
List of contents
Acknowledgments; List of images; Introduction; 1. A brief history of Sunzi in China; 2. Journey to the West; 3. The armchair captain; 4. Stilwell, Chiang Kai-Shek and World War II; 5. The China Marines; 6. The captain who taught a general; 7. 'The concentrated essence of wisdom on the conduct of war'; 8. The reaction to Griffith's Sunzi translation; 9. Robert Asprey, John Boyd and Sunzi; Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Peter Lorge is Associate Professor of Pre-Modern Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt University. His previous books include Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century and The Asian Military Revolution.
Summary
A major new revisionist history of the reception of the most important Chinese work on strategy, The Art of War, in the West. Peter Lorge contends that the Western interpretation of Sun Tzu's ideas was not based upon Chinese understandings of the text, but upon twentieth-century Western strategic ideas.
