Art of War

The Way of War is a Way of Deception. -Master Sun, Chapter 1IntroductionMaster Sun's short treatise The Art of Waris both inspirational and worrying. It is beautiful and chilling. It encapsulates a part of the irreducible essence of Chinese culture and has been familiar to literate Chinese down the ages. For that reason alone, it is an extraordinarily important book and one that should be read by anyone dealing with either China or Japan. During the Second World War, E. Machell-Cox produced a version for the Royal Air Force. "Master Sun," he wrote, "is fundamental and, read with insight, lays bare the mental mechanism of our enemy. Study him, and study him again. Do not be misled by his simplicity."1 Today, with China playing a more and more integral role in the world, Master Sun has become prescribed reading for global entrepreneurs. "Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting" (Chapter 3). Or, in the words of Gordon Gekko, the corporate raider in Oliver Stone's brilliant expose of late-twentieth-century American capitalism, Wall Street, "I bet on sure things. Sun Tzu: 'Every battle is won before it is fought.' Think about it." But The Art of Waroffers more than an insight into Chinese ways of doing things (including business). Like its venerable predecessor The Book of Changes, it lends itself to infinite applications. It has been used as a springboard for an American self-help book about interpersonal relationships.2 It could no doubt also serve as the basis for a book on tennis, cooking, or defensive driving. The strategic advice it offers concerns much more than the conduct of war. It is an ancient book of proverbial wisdom, a book of life. Cunning Plans, Popular Culture The Empty CityThe novel The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, written sometime in the fourteenth or fifteenth century, has been described as a vernacular expansion of Master Sun's ideas, a novelistic "folk manual of waging war, a description of the classical strategic and tactical solutions which were a part of the ancient theory of war, a popular lecture on classical theory [of warfare]."3 In a scene from Chapter 38, the most famous of all China's strategic wizards, Zhuge Liang (181-234), the "Sleeping Dragon," finally meets Liu Bei (161-223), pretender to the throne of the crumbling Han dynasty. This is Liu's third visit to the recluse's hermitage, his two previous visits having proved fruitless. The Dragon is at home, and Liu meets him face-to-face, a striking figure in his silken headscarf and Taoist-style robe lined with cranesdown, emanating the "buoyant air of a spiritual transcendent."4 Liu eventually succeeds in recruiting the hermit's services, and the Dragon, "though having never left his thatched cottage," proceeds to "demonstrate his foreknowledge of the balance of power." He goes on to mastermind Liu's military campaign with extraordinary cunning. One of the most famous of the Dragon's many strategic victories occurs some twenty years later, in the year a.d. 228, five years after the death of Liu Bei himself. Chapter 95 of the novel finds Zhuge cornered in the city of Xicheng (West City), with a paltry force of five thousand, against one hundred and fifty thousand troops of the northern state of Wei, led by the redoubtable marshal Sima Yi: The Sleeping Dragon dispatched half of his troops to transfer the grain and fodder from the city to where the main body of his forces was encamped, which left him with a mere 2,500 soldiers in the city. [The astute seventeenth-century commentator Mao Zong'gang observes at this point: Twenty-five hundred against one hundred and fifty thousand? Let's see how Master Sleeping Dragon manages to get out of this one!] His officers were aghast at the state of affairs. Sleeping Dragon mounted the battlements to view the situSun-Tzu is the author of 'Art of War' with ISBN 9780670031566 and ISBN 0670031569.