C. Ioutsen - The Way of War. Chinese Strategy Manual

Cover designer C. Ioutsen

Cover designer A. Lenina

Editor C. Ioutsen

© C. Ioutsen, 2019

© C. Ioutsen, cover design, 2019

© A. Lenina, cover design, 2019

ISBN 978-5-4493-8189-7

Created with Ridero smart publishing system

Warfare has been an integral part of human history since its earliest records but probably much longer. From sheer survival and fighting for one’s life to unstoppable quest for power, from single combat to global confrontation, from battleground carnage to cyber attacks on stock markets, warfare takes many forms, appears in many guises. Yet, be it a cunning plan or a brutal force, a club or a nuclear bomb, the very essence of conflict is inextricably tied to the human nature itself, and that, subtle and variable as it may be, seems to hardly have changed at all.

Profound yet strikingly simple understanding of human psyche is at the core of the Chinese art of war. Far from being purely theoretical speculations, so numerous in the Western history of thought regardless of subject, it is the product of cool-headed observation and cold-hearted calculation, despite traditional Chinese mysticism.

Although warfare proper is scarcely ever seen as something desirable today, which is not unlike the view taken by the Chinese themselves throughout their turbulent history, one way or another it is evidently still present, indeed essential, in many areas of human activity.

The similarity of modern-day life and business, in its multiple facets, to war is uncanny. After all, contentions and problems arise everywhere and need managing and solving. Some would go so far as to argue, not unconvincingly, that life itself is a war, or – at least – a struggle, and not just human life but life as such.

Warfare was much on the minds of the Chinese, too. In particular, the era from the fifth to the late third centuries B.C., aptly named by later historians the Warring States period, was a perpetual series of feudal clashes for predominance, a succession of minor and major conflicts, intermingled and never-ending, by and large a time of total war of industrial proportions, when hundreds of thousands of soldiers were sent to die on a regular basis, not even mentioning the much higher casualties suffered by civil population.

In circumstances such as these a competent strategic advice was the most valuable currency of the day. Pondering their experiences, the professional military men came to formulate concepts and discern principles to impose intellectual order upon the apparently chaotic nature of an armed contest, selling their services to the highest bidder. The resulting manuals eventually constituted the officially sanctioned curriculum for systematically studying military doctrine.

The imperial examination system, permeating Chinese bureaucracy from top to bottom, provided an extra incentive to bring the orthodox military texts under thorough scrutiny. It furnished the hypothesis and vocabulary required for commanders to mutually communicate in their specialized areas. Warfare thus became a science, encompassing battlefield analysis, enemy assessment, command and control, tactical decision-making, and countless other important nuances of military routine. It was also constantly augmented by the expertise and ruminations of veteran generals and could be ignored by field officers only at great peril.

Interestingly, raging violence and incessant fighting went hand in hand with sophisticated – veritably blossoming – culture and advancing technology of Chinese civilization. One factor at work here was the ever growing theoretical complexity. Military writings of the era often range over issues relating to the intersection of political efficacy, training, resource management, ideology, legitimacy, and morality. The diverse concerns of these texts meant that they in turn opened up a space for thinkers, strategists, career officers, and politicians of different times and places to work through questions of how the military sphere of the state was implicated in other aspects of statecraft, administrative policy, and political philosophy.

At the same time there was an intimate relationship between philosophy and warfare – many of the early Chinese thinkers took warfare to be an area of sustained philosophical reflection, while the military texts were themselves applied philosophy. In the imperial library catalogues military writers are repeatedly listed as philosophers or, rather, masters.

Hence the military paradigms initially discovered and formulated in map rooms and on battlefields, with an aid of abstract contemplation and meditative enlightenment, have come to reflect upon the very nature of struggle, of doing things – to risk the widest possible definition – and in this sense still lead themselves to infinite applications. The strategic and tactical advice scattered within thousands of years of Chinese military and non-military writings and expressed in characteristically proverbial language holds true to this day.

It must be emphasized however that as plausible, even obvious, as it may seem to us today, the Chinese of the Warring States era would have forcibly denied an over-generalization of the martial.

For one thing, the necessity to keep the civil and the military – two parts of the same whole – separated is often stressed even in military writings. Moreover, the precedence, aside from the conduct of an actual war, would unanimously be given to the civil, and not only in theory but also in practice, in the everyday attitude of the Chinese. The military service was not considered honorable in the society at large, the military men won no respect save among each other, the triumphant general was not supposed to gain political power. In contrast to Western history, dominated by warrior kings and conquering emperors, celebrated and glorified, the Chinese ruling class nobility consisted of bureaucrats, men with a brush, not with a sword.

From the prevalent view of peace-time management warfare always constituted loss and could only be tolerated with distaste, as necessary evil. Even a brilliant victory is a defeat in a sense that it entails an expenditure of manpower and resources.

Of more importance, perhaps, was the fact that similarity of warfare to other spheres of human pursuit was due to having certain ubiquitous phenomena in common and therefore being merely one particular way – of many – of dealing with them.

For instance, the concept of shi refers to strategic advantage, which is to say, the potential energy of situation and placement, and is found in manuals and guidebooks on such diverse subjects as calligraphy, cooking, literature, music, painting, and sex, among others. Curiously, despite the evident difference in subject matter, the language and terminology of these texts would often resemble each other to the extent that they would be almost indistinguishable, so that a Chinese reader might have had some difficulty in knowing whether he was perusing a sex manual or a strategy one (indeed these two have been seen to maintain the closest association).

For Western logic it might be easier to conceive, or at least practically handle, these as variations on implementation of a military theory. For Chinese logic the principle is neutral and universal and has as much legitimacy when applied to a choice of the right place for a table in a room as to a positioning of an armed unit on a battleground.

Nowhere was it better embodied than in one of China’s most elusive teachings, Taoism. It is remarkable, even if not quite surprising, that an ideology as arcane as Taoism, which could not even be discussed save in parables and allegories and paradoxes, informed much of ruthless pragmatism and sheer practicality of warfare. Many basic Taoist notions are shared, often quite literally, within context of military or semi-military discourse.