Chinese Realpolitik and Sun Tzu’s Art of War
The Chinese have been
shrewd practitioners of Realpolitik and
students of a strategic doctrine distinctly different from the
strategy and diplomacy that found favor in the West. A turbulent
history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a
solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over
specific events could upset the harmony of the universe. There were
too many potential enemies for the empire ever to live in total
security. If China’s fate was relative security, it also implied
relative insecurity—the need to learn the grammar of over a dozen
neighboring states with significantly different histories and
aspirations. Rarely did Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a
conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash; elaborate multiyear
maneuvers were closer to their style. Where the Western tradition
prized the decisive clash of forces emphasizing feats of heroism,
the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient
accumulation of relative advantage.
This contrast is
reflected in the respective intellectual games favored by each
civilization. China’s most enduring game is wei qi (pronounced roughly “way chee,” and often
known in the West by a variation of its Japanese name, go). Wei qi translates
as “a game of surrounding pieces”; it implies a concept of
strategic encirclement. The board, a grid of nineteen-by-nineteen
lines, begins empty. Each player has 180 pieces, or stones, at his
disposal, each of equal value with the others. The players take
turns placing stones at any point on the board, building up
positions of strength while working to encircle and capture the
opponent’s stones. Multiple contests take place simultaneously in
different regions of the board. The balance of forces shifts
incrementally with each move, as the players implement strategic
plans and react to each other’s initiatives. At the end of a
well-played game, the board is filled by partially interlocking
areas of strength. The margin of advantage is often slim, and to
the untrained eye, the identity of the winner is not always
immediately obvious.30
Chess, on the other
hand, is about total victory. The purpose of the game is checkmate,
to put the opposing king into a position where he cannot move
without being destroyed. The vast majority of games end in total
victory achieved by attrition or, more rarely, a dramatic, skillful
maneuver. The only other possible outcome is a draw, meaning the
abandonment of the hope for victory by both parties.
THE OUTCOME OF A
WEI QI GAME BETWEEN TWO EXPERT PLAYERS.
BLACK HAS WON BY A SLIGHT MARGIN.
Source: David Lai, “Learning from the Stones: A Go
Approach to Mastering China’s Strategic
Concept, Shi” (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army
War College Strategic Studies Institute, 2004).
If chess is about the
decisive battle, wei qi is about the
protracted campaign. The chess player aims for total victory. The
wei qi player seeks relative advantage.
In chess, the player always has the capability of the adversary in
front of him; all the pieces are always fully deployed. The
wei qi player needs to assess not only
the pieces on the board but the reinforcements the adversary is in
a position to deploy. Chess teaches the Clausewitzian concepts of
“center of gravity” and the “decisive point”—the game usually
beginning as a struggle for the center of the board. Wei qi teaches the art of strategic encirclement.
Where the skillful chess player aims to eliminate his opponent’s
pieces in a series of head-on clashes, a talented wei qi player moves into “empty” spaces on the
board, gradually mitigating the strategic potential of his
opponent’s pieces. Chess produces single-mindedness; wei qi generates strategic
flexibility.
A similar contrast
exists in the case of China’s distinctive military theory. Its
foundations were laid during a period of upheaval, when ruthless
struggles between rival kingdoms decimated China’s population.
Reacting to this slaughter (and seeking to emerge victorious from
it), Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a
premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the
avoidance of direct conflict.
The seminal figure in
this tradition is known to history as Sun Tzu (or “Master Sun”),
author of the famed treatise The Art of
War. Intriguingly, no one is sure exactly who he was. Since
ancient times, scholars have debated the identity of The Art of War’s author and the date of its
composition. The book presents itself as a collection of sayings by
one Sun Wu, a general and wandering military advisor from the
Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history (770–476 B.C.), as
recorded by his disciples. Some Chinese and later Western scholars
have questioned whether such a Master Sun existed or, if he did,
whether he was in fact responsible for The Art
of War’s contents.31
Well over two
thousand years after its composition, this volume of epigrammatic
observations on strategy, diplomacy, and war—written in classical
Chinese, halfway between poetry and prose—remains a central text of
military thought. Its maxims found vivid expression in the
twentieth-century Chinese civil war at the hands of Sun Tzu’s
student Mao Zedong, and in the Vietnam wars, as Ho Chi Minh and Vo
Nguyen Giap employed Sun Tzu’s principles of indirect attack and
psychological combat against France and then the United States.
(Sun Tzu has also achieved a second career of sorts in the West,
with popular editions of The Art of War
recasting him as a modern business management guru.) Even today Sun
Tzu’s text reads with a degree of immediacy and insight that places
him among the ranks of the world’s foremost strategic thinkers. One
could argue that the disregard of his precepts was importantly
responsible for America’s frustration in its Asian
wars.
What distinguishes
Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the
psychological and political elements over the purely military. The
great European military theorists Carl von Clausewitz and
Antoine-Henri Jomini treat strategy as an activity in its own
right, separate from politics. Even Clausewitz’s famous dictum that
war is the continuation of politics by other means implies that
with war the statesman enters a new and distinct
phase.
Sun Tzu merges the
two fields. Where Western strategists reflect on the means to
assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses
the means of building a dominant political and psychological
position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone
conclusion. Western strategists test their maxims by victories in
battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become
unnecessary.
Sun Tzu’s text on war
does not have the quality of exaltation of some European literature
on the subject, nor does it appeal to personal heroism. Its somber
quality is reflected in the portentous opening of The Art of War:
War is
A grave affair of the state;
It is a place
Of life and death,
A road
To survival and extinction,
A matter
To be pondered carefully.32
And because the
consequences of war are so grave, prudence is the value most to be
cherished:
A ruler
Must never
Mobilize his men
Out of anger;
A general must never
Engage [in] battle
Out of spite . . .Anger
Can turn to
Pleasure;
Spite
Can turn to
Joy.
But a nation destroyed
Cannot be
Put back together again;
A dead man
Cannot be
Brought back to life.So the enlightened ruler
Is prudent;
The effective general
Is cautious.
This is the Way
To keep a nation
At peace
And an army
Intact.33
What should a
statesman be prudent about? For Sun Tzu, victory is not simply the
triumph of armed forces. Instead, it is the achievement of the
ultimate political objectives that the military clash was intended
to secure. Far better than challenging the enemy on the field of
battle is undermining an enemy’s morale or maneuvering him into an
unfavorable position from which escape is impossible. Because war
is a desperate and complex enterprise, self-knowledge is crucial.
Strategy resolves itself into a psychological contest:
Ultimate excellence lies
Not in winning
Every battle
But in defeating the enemy
Without ever fighting.
The highest form of warfare
Is to attack [the enemy’s]
Strategy itself;
The next,
To attack [his]
Alliances.
The next,
To attack
Armies;
The lowest form of war is
To attack
Cities.
Siege warfare
Is a last resort . . .The Skillful Strategist
Defeats the enemy
Without doing battle,
Captures the city
Without laying siege,
Overthrows the enemy state
Without protracted war.34
Ideally, the
commander would achieve a position of such dominance that he could
avoid battle entirely. Or else he would use arms to deliver a coup
de grâce after extensive analysis and logistical, diplomatic, and
psychological preparation. Thus Sun Tzu’s counsel that
The victorious army
Is victorious first
And seeks battle later;
The defeated army
Does battle first
And seeks victory later.35
Because attacks on an
opponent’s strategy and his alliances involve psychology and
perception, Sun Tzu places considerable emphasis on the use of
subterfuge and misinformation. “When able,” he counseled,
Feign inability;
When deploying troops,
Appear not to be.
When near,
Appear far;
When far,
Appear near.36
To the commander
following Sun Tzu’s precepts, a victory achieved indirectly through
deception or manipulation is more humane (and surely more
economical) than a triumph by superior force. The Art of War advises the commander to induce his
opponent into accomplishing the commander’s own aims or force him
into a position so impossible that he opts to surrender his army or
state unharmed.
Perhaps Sun Tzu’s
most important insight was that in a military or strategic contest,
everything is relevant and connected: weather, terrain, diplomacy,
the reports of spies and double agents, supplies and logistics, the
balance of forces, historic perceptions, the intangibles of
surprise and morale. Each factor influences the others, giving rise
to subtle shifts in momentum and relative advantage. There are no
isolated events.
Hence the task of a
strategist is less to analyze a particular situation than to
determine its relationship to the context in which it occurs. No
particular constellation is ever static; any pattern is temporary
and in essence evolving. The strategist must capture the direction
of that evolution and make it serve his ends. Sun Tzu uses the word
“shi” for that quality, a concept with
no direct Western counterpart.37 In the military context, shi connotes the strategic trend and “potential
energy” of a developing situation, “the power inherent in the
particular arrangement of elements and . . . its developmental
tendency.”38 In The Art of
War, the word connotes the ever-changing configuration of
forces as well as their general trend.
To Sun Tzu, the
strategist mastering shi is akin to
water flowing downhill, automatically finding the swiftest and
easiest course. A successful commander waits before charging
headlong into battle. He shies away from an enemy’s strength; he
spends his time observing and cultivating changes in the strategic
landscape. He studies the enemy’s preparations and his morale,
husbands resources and defines them carefully, and plays on his
opponent’s psychological weaknesses—until at last he perceives the
opportune moment to strike the enemy at his weakest point. He then
deploys his resources swiftly and suddenly, rushing “downhill”
along the path of least resistance, in an assertion of superiority
that careful timing and preparation have rendered a fait
accompli.39 The Art of War
articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of
psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought
America (though Hanoi usually translated its psychological gains
into actual territorial conquests as well).
In general, Chinese
statesmanship exhibits a tendency to view the entire strategic
landscape as part of a single whole: good and evil, near and far,
strength and weakness, past and future all interrelated. In
contrast to the Western approach of treating history as a process
of modernity achieving a series of absolute victories over evil and
backwardness, the traditional Chinese view of history emphasized a
cyclical process of decay and rectification, in which nature and
the world can be understood but not completely mastered. The best
that can be accomplished is to grow into harmony with it. Strategy
and statecraft become means of “combative coexistence” with
opponents. The goal is to maneuver them into weakness while
building up one’s own shi, or strategic
position.40
This “maneuvering”
approach is, of course, the ideal and not always the reality.
Throughout their history, the Chinese have had their share of
“unsubtle” and brutal conflicts, both at home and occasionally
abroad. Once these conflicts erupted, such as during the
unification of China under the Qin Dynasty, the clashes of the
Three Kingdoms period, the quelling of the Taiping Rebellion, and
the twentieth-century civil war, China was subjected to wholesale
loss of life on a level comparable to the European world wars. The
bloodiest conflicts occurred as a result of the breakdown of the
internal Chinese system—in other words, as an aspect of internal
adjustments of a state for which domestic stability and protection
against looming foreign invasion are equal concerns.
For China’s classical
sages, the world could never be conquered; wise rulers could hope
only to harmonize with its trends. There was no New World to
populate, no redemption awaiting mankind on distant shores. The
promised land was China, and the Chinese were already there. The
blessings of the Middle Kingdom’s culture might theoretically be
extended, by China’s superior example, to the foreigners on the
empire’s periphery. But there was no glory to be found in venturing
across the seas to convert “heathens” to Chinese ways; the customs
of the Celestial Dynasty were plainly beyond the attainment of the
far barbarians.
This may be the
deeper meaning of China’s abandonment of its naval tradition.
Lecturing in the 1820s on his philosophy of history, the German
philosopher Hegel described the Chinese tendency to see the huge
Pacific Ocean to their east as a barren waste. He noted that China,
by and large, did not venture to the seas and instead depended on
its great landmass. The land imposed “an infinite multitude of
dependencies,” whereas the sea propelled people “beyond these
limited circles of thought and action”: “This stretching out of the
sea beyond the limitations of the land, is wanting to the splendid
political edifices of Asiatic States, although they themselves
border on the sea—as for example, China. For them the sea is only
the limit, the ceasing of the land; they have no positive relations
to it.” The West had set sail to spread its trade and values
throughout the world. In this respect, Hegel argued, land-bound
China—which in fact had once been the world’s greatest naval
power—was “severed from the general historical development.”41
With these
distinctive traditions and millennial habits of superiority, China
entered the modern age a singular kind of empire: a state claiming
universal relevance for its culture and institutions but making few
efforts to proselytize; the wealthiest country in the world but one
that was indifferent to foreign trade and technological innovation;
a culture of cosmopolitanism overseen by a political elite
oblivious to the onset of the Western age of exploration; and a
political unit of unparalleled geographic extent that was unaware
of the technological and historical currents that would soon
threaten its existence.