Talking Strategy Podcast – Season 2
Episode 1: Sun Tzu - Classical Chinese Strategic Thought with Dr Peter Lorge
Beatrice Heuser. We are joined from the U.S. today by Dr. Peter Lorge. Dr. Lorge is an associate professor of pre-modern Chinese and military history at Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently The Beginner's Guide to Imperial China that came out in 2021, and perhaps most famously so far, the Asian Military Revolution From Gunpowder to the Bomb, which came out with Cambridge University Press in 2008. Peter Lorge has two forthcoming books: ‘Documents from Early Chinese History’, which is a sourcebook for pre-modern Chinese history, written with Scott Pierce, and ‘Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo-American Art of War ', which explores both the writings of Sunzi and the impact it had on Western thinking, especially in the last half-century.
Now, just about everything that I know about Sunzi I know from Professor Peter Lorge. Let's start with your foreseeably shocking answers to my question. Did Sunzi exist? When did he exist - if he was just one person? Over to you!
Peter Lorge. Well, he did not exist. Modern scholarship is absolutely certain about this, but premodern scholarship also recognized that this was not an individual and it's not an author. If you read the text in classical Chinese, you can see very different language. Some chapters are composed clearly by piecing together from other chapters, other pieces of work, and a lot of the ideas were pre-existing. So, we have a text, some say of the third century BCE. It seems to be a compilation of aphorisms and bits of wisdom. Notice the numbered lists and those of you who are in the military, you're very familiar with the notion of a checklist: there are seven kinds of this, or three kinds of that, or nine things that I need to do. And so what you'll see is the markers of what was presumably an oral tradition; of a school of thought that developed over time, and then was organised and redone and redone.
But from the third century BCE, we start having actual archaeological digs where we're finding fragments or significant chunks of the Sunzi text which are pretty consistent with what we have now. So, what we have is a good transmission for over 2000 years from what it originally was. But there was no “Master Sun”. Or if there was, he's not some guy who sat down at one point in time and wrote it down. There might have been a school of thought certainly by the third century and before people knew about Sunzi as a text and early Chinese concepts of authorship are a whole other field: it's not sort of our notion that we have now of I am sitting in my office writing a text. It's much more fluid. With Confucius, “Master Kong”, it’s the same thing: he becomes a very famous person, and then there are actually something like hundreds, if not thousands of stories using Confucius (as a character). There was, in fact, an actual man in that case. But in the case of Master Sunzi, there might have been some guy at some point, but not the author of the text.
Beatrice Can you just enlighten us for a moment about the pronunciation?
Peter In modern Mandarin, it would be “Swindze”. Sunzi comes out of Romanisation. That is really not used anymore, except from some very old scholars who are still clinging to it for reasons which escape me.
Beatrice You realise that anybody who will listen to this podcast in future will say ‘Swindze’, so we can always identify the people who listen to us. Brilliant. Okay. Tell us more about the military, the war context of the period in which this the first evidence for this text actually appears.
Peter So, what we're what we're looking at with Sunzi is the result of a transformation in society, in warfare, from an aristocratic system of warfare; of aristocrats riding chariots, fighting other aristocrats with chariots, and then backing them up with fairly small groups of not that well-trained infantry. And what happens in the Spring and Autumn Period, we have a transition to the Warring States Period where the army size gets larger. The chariot forces become much less important. And we have the rise of professional generals as opposed to aristocrats who happen to have a chariot. And so, if you ever read Mark Edward Lewis’ classic account of this ‘Sanctioned Violence in Early China’ is really the best source for that.2 And when you read Sunzi, you will see him talking about how you shouldn't wage war in that old-timey fashion: you don't wage war because the ruler just wants to wage war. You start getting notions of raison d’état [reasons of state]; that there is a higher strategic value for states that goes beyond just the feelings of the ruler, and that fighting, and war, needs to be done rationally. And this is, of course, why Sunzi actually makes a lot of sense when he gets [translated into] French in 1772, because it keys into this Enlightenment notion of rational warfare.
As you start getting larger armies, of course, where you're fighting more extended battles, you have to start having logistics. You have to march tens of thousands of men. You have to supply them with weapons. You have to move them across the land. You have to keep them fed. And this is a radical change from the Spring and Autumn Period aristocrats; this transition to professional generals, is very profound. It also is a radical difference in what happens in China, in Chinese political development, as compared to Europe., because Chinese emperors, the first emperor is usually a general, may be the second, but Chinese emperors don't usually go to warfare, and there's no concept that they really should. And that comes out of this early Chinese shift in ideology, which comes out of this shift in warfare. Whereas In Europe, you still have rulers actually on the battlefields for centuries more; in China generally, emperors usually don't go to war. And that's a very big difference. You know, the generals are professionals. And Sunzi feeds into this intellectual tradition and this ideological concept of professional generals.
Beatrice When you were talking about how to pronounce the name itself, you were already doing something which I particularly respect you for. Namely, why one should really read the texts in the original Chinese. And this means that one should know ancient Chinese. And I personally trust nobody who claims to know something about Sunzi who does not actually read ancient Chinese. So please tell us why there are so many problems with translating Sunzi into modern English.
Peter Okay. So, we run into multiple layers of problems here. If we set aside the archaeological, you know, technical, epigraphy issues. Our concepts don't map directly onto ancient Chinese concepts. Over the last 2000 years, the commentarial tradition has disagreements about what certain passages mean. There's antiquarian issues, there's linguistic issues, and then there's sort of strategic and conceptual issues. You know, did this character change and if it did, why? What did that term mean in its time? And then we get into people reading passages differently, and then we go back and we read a text in which the terms do not map directly onto modern English terms. And we are trying to simplify that meaning down to one meaning. And the commentaries are arguing about what this passage means. The translator, for at least the popular audience, (and I generally don't write for the popular audience) has to choose a meaning out of a set of meanings that don't map directly onto our concept. And of course, the obvious one here is the Zheng-Qi issue, the orthodox-unorthodox or direct-indirect. I just had someone sent me a translation that they did and they tried to use linear-nonlinear. This concept of what it means to be orthodox or “direct”, versus unorthodox or “indirect”, is basically insoluble. This is very much [the influence of the ideas of] B.H. Liddell Hart3, not really Chinese. And so, if you read modern Chinese interpretations of these passages, they were again different from the Western readings of it. And so we have a text that has many, many meanings. And if you ask a translator to simplify it down to one meaning, it doesn't work very well.
Beatrice Could you unpack that a little bit more? What's the story about direct-indirect, linear-non-linear, orthodox-unorthodox?
Peter We run into a conceptual issue here where we have a lot of baggage that we bring to it in the West and it's very hard to get away from it, both because of all the business concepts of using “strategy”.
One of the points that Sunzi makes (and it comes out of other Chinese concepts as well), is that we're not talking about an absolute fixed designation of something being orthodox and something else being unorthodox. So, if let's say, I trick you in some way in whatever conflict we're in, the first time I do, it might be unorthodox, it might be trickery. The second time I do it, it starts to become orthodox. So, if I start doing something the same way, something which starts out as unorthodox, can become orthodox. Something that starts out as indirect becomes direct, because then I keep doing it. Our concept seems to be much more a sense of orthodox or direct, which is to say force on force clash, which our modern military spends a lot of time trying not to do: we want deep strikes, we want to go around the flanks. And to anyone who’s read Jomini or Clausewitz4, this is not unfamiliar. And so, the argument is: what is effective? The late Peter Boodberg made an argument of a slightly different version of the term Zheng as to fix in place. And then Qi is to topple. So, you make a conventional attack that fixes your opponent in place and then you swing around them - that's the unconventional. But that's not unconventional, right? Because we know that we're doing that. So, our translation runs into a serious problem, which is how do we make clear what he means?
One of the things I was always taught when you do martial arts is you “train” your opponent: you do something a several times, so the opponent begins to expect something, and then you do something else. And now the question is, “is that a Zheng strategy because I was taught it?” So now it's an orthodox strategy to use a Zheng technique to set them up and a Qi technique, an indirect, technique to defeat them. Even from a teaching perspective, I had someone who told me they had Oh, somebody colleague came into the class. They taught this wonderful class. Through the students off completely on what they did. They all had this wonderful learning experience that, you know, that works once. The second time you try that, it's orthodox. The students have adapted. It doesn't work again. So, if you're always trying to disrupt someone's learning cycle in order to make them learn in a different way, it's very difficult to do something new every time. And in fact, there are costs involved with that as well.
Beatrice Tell us about another idea of his that is particularly important. And again, give us the context and how it can be interpreted in different ways.
Peter Well, the overwhelming majority of people who discuss Sunzi in the world today don’t read it in the original. But even of the people who read it in the original, very few are actually people who do strategy or who do military history or are generals. So, the fundamental concept is that war is something which can be rationally approached. When I said that Sunzi was written by multiple hands. I want to emphasise that; I think that the multiple edits and the many people who went through it did an excellent job of creating a coherent and logical text. The text makes sense, it has an order to it, and that's one of the reasons why I find it very strange when people start sort of wandering into Chapter 9 and pull a line out and say, ‘This is the core!’
The beginning of the text says ‘war is a matter of vital importance to the state. You can’t not investigate it.’ And one of the fundamental concepts of Sunzi is that war is a rational process. You can evaluate things ahead of time. Sunzi attempts to argue that you can know ahead of time how things are going to go. And I think that's probably the key concept. And it's in the first line, and that often gets passed over because people don't want strategy to be something where they say, “stop and think before you get involved with the fight. Don't fight and then find out whether you’re going to win.” You should know beforehand whether you’re going to win. And in fact, if you do your job right as a general, you’re not going to get the glory. Everyone’s going to say, ‘that was easy, you just beat those guys easily’. Well, the reason why you beat them easily is because you had prepared ahead of time, you shaped the battlefield to use our modern terminology for that, set it up so that you would have all the advantages and he would have all the disadvantages. And that's why it looked easy.
The general, though, who usually wins with glory, is someone who screwed up and gets to the battlefield and then desperately pulls success out of the jaws of defeat. Sunzi is saying, look, that's a bad general. But that's a very hard argument to make, even to a ruler, let alone a country where you have a political system. People want the glorious battle where we defeat the bad guy, not the ‘what didn't happen’.
Beatrice What you've told us is very, very different to some extent from what's happening in the West. In the West, in classical antiquity and beyond, there were many strategists who said, ‘stop and think, evaluate the situation, and don't go to battle if you don't think you're going to win’. However, there is a very strong tradition from classical antiquity all the way to modern times, which also is part of an Islamic tradition, namely that there is a very large element of chance, of accident, the things you cannot foresee. And what you're telling us is that Sunzi is somebody who says you can foresee it, you can plan it all, you can press it all into an overall plan that you have prepared in advance. I mean, he's not different at all in saying, you must prepare. But it seems to me radically different to say all this can be prepared.
Peter He's very much arguing against a certain mindset. So, if we look at the text as an argument, the text is arguing against a certain way of going to war. To the extent that we can make the argument Clausewitz was describing warfare in his time rather than trying to universalise based on what he had seen, and Sunzi in a certain sense was universalising, arguing for a view of the world, or for a way of doing things.
A lot of generals, many of whom for most of China's history, were illiterate, grew up in the army. They knew how to fight. They knew how to win a battle. They knew there was chance. And they probably knew sort of basics of strategy, but they weren’t really being asked to make the kind of strategic decisions that Sunzi is talking about. Sunzi is addressed to a literate audience. And most generals probably said, “well, you know, I’ll get out to the battlefield, and I’ll have more guys than the other guys and I’ll be up on the hill, he’ll be down the hill and then we’ll fight. But sometimes, you lose.” Sunzi doesn’t give you that out. You could argue that what he's doing is arguing against what people usually do, confident, perhaps, that it will only be partially successful. So, perhaps Sunzi is making an abstract argument for doing it (war) a certain way, and maybe the people following this know for certain that there's no perfection in war. There's going to be contingency.
Paul O’Neill. For whom is Sunzi writing? If he's got illiterate generals who aren't going to read his work, is he writing for the political leadership about reasons of state, as you describe, and therefore the decisions of statespeople? People much like Machiavelli would be writing something like The Prince?5 Is this an early Chinese equivalent of that, or is this intended to influence how rulers were shaping the conduct of military operations?
Peter I presume a lot of texts were memorised. I work in primarily the 10th and 11th century, and when we get there, we start having printing and people start actually having books. But for most of time there's a lot of memorisation that goes on, so partly this is a tradition that is transmitted orally. It would be educated people, which is to say to this transition from the aristocratic to professional generals. For the most part, even these professional generals were coming from the aristocracy. It's only (in the) Third Century, we start getting the rise of the Qin state, where there are people who can rise up, in theory, from the bottom of being a farmer to becoming a general by success in war but there aren't that many people who make it from farmer to leading general. You still have a lot of, essentially, aristocrats, people of consistent military families, of military men, who would have had traditions of war. And (Sunzi) is aimed at them. And you're trying to tell these young men who are sort of all fired up, they've got their sword, they've got their spear, let's go kill someone: ‘Okay, stop! Try to be a little more thoughtful.’ Once it becomes written down, it becomes an object of non-military officials and emperors, and rulers who are not emperors, kings and dukes being able to access this. It’s place changes in Chinese history because for a long time it is seen as a very disruptive and contrary to realist or Confucian ideas. It ultimately becomes part of the Confucian concept. It gets sort of absorbed into it and it gains an intellectual value.
Let's say you were a government official. You were a civil official, you have no military experience, so what do you do? You pull out this military text and you cite that text when you're at court arguing with the general.6 And a lot of times what you’ll see in the debates is the general comes in, they say, ‘I'll take a bunch of guys and will go beat them up.’ And some official says, ‘Well, you know, Sunzi says: you should do this, you should do that.’ And there's always this kind of conflict. Do you listen to the guy who's read the book or the guy who has actually gone out to the field? So that's where [the work of Sunzi] has its power. But, there are lessons in there for the ruler. [Sunzi] is trying to tell rulers, you know, don't interfere with the general while he's out in the field. So, you can break the text down and see messages to different audiences There are lines in there which are clearly directed to the ruler, you know, “Don't do this, don't do that”, “Choose a good general”. There's a line about “If you have someone who follows my precepts, they'll be successful. Choose that guy. If he doesn't follow my precepts, fire them”. There are other lines that are clearly directed toward a general, so it’s a multifaceted text in that sense.
Beatrice Could I bring you to discuss an idea that is very often associated now with Sunzi, which is the idea that the ideal is to win without a battle? We find that taking up again in the 18th century without any attribution and just a wheel reinvented by Maurice de Saxe (1696-1750).
Peter Sunzi’s ideal is that, if you set things up correctly, you will achieve what you want without having to fight. But what he understands is, in this notion of manoeuvring for advantage, you actually have to have an opponent who understands what's happening. So, if we are manoeuvring, we are doing our political things we're military, we're forming alliances, we're positioning troops. I get into an advantageous position. My opponent in this has to understand enough to go, Ooh, I don't want to fight this guy because - we're going to lose. So ideally, I have an intelligent interlocutor.
Beatrice It's like a game of chess where somebody throws over their king because they realise that in the next five moves that opponent is going to defeat them.
Peter Yeah. The goal, that's easy, the hard part is to get into the position to do it. The problem, of course, is what happens when the person doesn't concede.
Beatrice This presumes an agonal type of war; a type of war in which both sides are actually fighting according to very well-defined rules, respecting those rules and not with the terrible passion of, say, the French Revolution, or with the terrible passion unleashed by, say, Hitler's wars. So, it's a particular sort of war, and hence the importance of understanding it in its own historical context.
Peter Yes. It’s this intellectualization which really appeals to intellectuals. And this is why, for most of Chinese history, the Sunzi tradition is a very literate tradition, and it is very self-referential; it's very Talmudic. You'll get this sort of commentary on commentary, and disagreeing with other commentaries.
This is an important aspect, by the way, that people don't really know what the other guy's thinking. And so, if you have some notion of deterrence through signalling, but the other guy either doesn't understand what you're signalling or he doesn't care – or you're trying to tell him something, or he doesn't believe you, that's one of the issues. A lot of great generals were not chess players, because in chess, you have perfect understanding of the strategy. The board is in front of you. You can see all the pieces. You can look at it completely rationally. But in war, we don't know all the things that are going on. And there’s just so much fog of war (to go back to Clausewitz): how do you plan for the opponent that you don't understand what they're thinking or they what they want to come out of the conflict with? What is the goal? And we talk about strategy without that reference to goals all the time.
Paul You've highlighted that you have to understand ancient Chinese, that the interpretations of it have all of these problems associated with it; the cultural, the linguistic, the conceptual, because some of the concepts don't apply in the Western context. Beatrice was mentioning about having to understand the rules and the rules are different, perhaps. And yet Sunzi has this enormous reputation. To what extent is this enduring relevance, or credibility afforded to Sunzi, justified, and to what extent is this actually something we ought to be challenging?
Peter Well, I think actually we should be challenging it at a very fundamental level. The biggest problem I have with this apotheosis of Sunzi in the 20th century/21st century is that it's generally used in the West as a substitute for actually doing Chinese history, and knowing anything about Chinese military history in particular. So we'll have a bunch of people who will talk all sorts of details about Western military history. They will skip over Clausewitz because, you know, he's too hard and too complicated. And then you get to Sunzi. So, suddenly what you have is this bunch of people who say, ‘I understand all of Chinese military history because I have read this very short translation, and I'm now going to compare that to my knowledge of Western military history as distinct from Western strategic history, Western strategic thought’. If you look at Chinese history, you will actually not see an enormous amount of Sunzi in military and strategic discussions at court. It's not some dominant theme. So, then we run to the problem of what is actually going on in Chinese wars. And that takes an awful lot of research; look at David Graff's work, or Ken Swope’s7. The Chinese tradition of military history is different. The Chinese tradition of writing about military strategic thought, military thought is different (from that of the West).
So, I would say that we overemphasise Sunzi, because it's a cover for our ignorance of what's actually happened in Chinese history and where it becomes critical. We in the West read Sunzi differently than the current Chinese military does. And so, when our people in the West make generalisations or try to predict what the Chinese military will do, or is thinking, based on a Western reading of Sunzi, we are wildly off track. We are completely wrong. We should at least read what the Chinese military says about Sunzi and then engage the question of whether the Chinese military is, in fact, influenced by Sunzi. And these are much different questions than we get. And we usually approach these issues like, ‘well, I just read Sunzi, and the Chinese are going to be indirect, going to try to win without fighting. Don't we try to win without fighting? Don't we try to come in and buy people off and try to influence things?’ But is it good when they do it and bad [when we do]? I mean, none of those strategies show up in either Sunzi or Clausewitz.
So, is Sunzi operational? And I think that's a very big question. I think Sunzi is much less operational than we give it credit for. And I think Sunzi has been much less important on the battlefield for all of Chinese history, than we are comfortable with.
Paul Are there [other Chinese] authors that you would suggest we engage with? Or is Sunzi merely indicative of the fact it's culturally so different, that unless you have that deep understanding, any Chinese author that you read, particularly an ancient author, will be liable to that kind of misinterpretation, and we will come away with a completely different reading of it from the way it's influencing the Chinese.
Peter I am a middle period Chinese historian. Things that I read mean certain things in my time period with my authors. Three hundred years before, it was different. Two hundred years afterward, it was different. So, there isn't a monolithic Chinese culture. And so, we should read more than just Sunzi. One needs to read military history. You need to read more than even the Seven Military Classics8. But the Seven Military Classics, which are developed in the period I work in, was a military curriculum for military education. That was not an abstract statement of fundamental Chinese strategic beliefs. That was constructed by officials in the 11th century to assert a Confucian set of values about warfare, about education. They were trying to say, look, we will get better generals if they read these books. Yet we actually have no indication of generals who got their military degrees and then went on to become great generals. So, we have this huge problem. How do you connect the text to the battlefield? And so, if you say to me, you know, which texts should I read to understand Chinese martial behaviour I'd give you a very long list and most of it would not be in English. Sorry.
Beatrice I would just like to sum up a couple of points, because I think they’re so important. First of all, for understanding Sunzi, you need to understand the period in which that was written and put together and the purposes for which it was written. And then you can't simply assume that because something was written 2,300 years ago, it still dominates thinking today. You have just explained to us that people might refer to it in this sort of ritualistic way. But that is no guarantee at all that any of the things that are said in this text would now be dominating Chinese thinking. So, on the one hand, this devalues to some extent the importance of this text, but on the other hand, it gives this text a much more general and much more enduring relevance on a completely different, more general, level on which one should try to come to grips with the text with a better knowledge of what the original text actually says. So, we are looking forward to reading your book about this and having more of an understanding of how his text was interpreted, not only in China but in the West. Peter Lorge, thank you very much for joining us today. It's been a great pleasure talking to you.
Peter Thanks for having me, this was great fun.
The enigmatic Chinese text that took its definitive form in the third century BC was not discovered in Europe until shortly before the French Revolution and, significantly, by a French missionary. The document’s thoughts on strategy – such as the ideal of winning without giving battle – diverged strongly from those of the battle-obsessed West. Barely remembered for centuries, Sun Tzu’s ideas went through a staggering renaissance in the 20th century, inspiring Mao Zedong and strongly impacting Western thinkers who were struggling to come to terms with the Chinese Communist insurgency’s triumph in China and the US defeat in Vietnam.
Sun Tzu’s approach is that of rationalization and planning of warfare. His text advocates evaluating a conflict ahead of time, supposing that one can know its dimensions with reasonable accuracy, and largely excluding contingency. Famously, it says that one should know oneself and one’s enemy, by implication also foresee the outcome of all military exchanges. The text thus falls into the category of those, like Christine de Pizan’s and Machiavelli’s works, that argue in favor of prudent planning in the belief that this can minimize risk and uncertainty.
Dr. Peter Lorge is an Associate Professor of Premodern Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt University. He is the author or editor of nine books, most recently The Beginner’s Guide to Imperial China (2021), and perhaps most famously The Asian Military Revolution: From Gunpowder to the Bomb (CUP 2008). Dr. Lorge has two forthcoming books: Documents From Early Chinese History, a sourcebook for premodern Chinese history written with Scott Pearce, and Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo-American Art of War, which explores both the writings of Sun Tzu and the impact they have had on Western thinking, especially in the last half-century.
