Ancient China on Postmodern War

Enduring Ideas from the Chinese Strategic Tradition

Thomas M. Kane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415384797
• eBook ISBN: 9781134173914
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Sun Tzu and other classical Chinese strategic thinkers wrote in an era of social, economic and military revolution, and hoped to identify enduring principles of war and statecraft. The twenty-first century is a time of similarly revolutionary change, and this makes their ideas of particular relevance for today's strategic environment. Placing these theories in historical context, Dr Kane explores ancient Chinese reactions to such issues as advances in military technology and insurgency and terrorism, providing interesting comparisons between modern and ancient.

The book explains the way prominent Chinese thinkers - such as Sun Tzu, Han Fei Tzu and Lao Tzu - treated critical strategic questions. It also compares their ideas to those of thinkers from other times and civilizations (e.g. Clausewitz) to illuminate particularly important points. In concluding, the book addresses the question of how ancient Chinese ideas might inform contemporary strategic debates.

Ancient China on Postmodern War will be of much interest to students of strategic studies, Chinese philosophy and military history.

1 Introduction

‘[A]s water has no constant form,’ the Chinese strategist Sun Tzu noted, ‘there are in warfare no constant conditions’ (Tao 1986: 107). Just as Sun Tzu might have predicted, military thought and practice at the beginning of the twenty-first century has been far from constant. Barely two decades earlier, the Cold War dominated world politics and strategic thought. Between 1989 and 1991, with relatively little warning, Moscow relinquished its European satellites, dissolved the Soviet Union and sought more cordial relations with the West. American president George H.W. Bush proclaimed a New World Order based upon the United Nations (UN). Simultaneously, the success of American information technology in the 1990–1 Gulf War encouraged many to foresee a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that would make late twentieth-century armed forces – and even, perhaps, their nuclear arsenals – obsolete.

Other journalists, historians and military officers predicted that ongoing social trends would prove even more revolutionary, possibly destroying the nation-state itself and ushering in a neo-medieval age of overlapping political systems or a neo-barbaric age of anarchy (Kaplan 1994: passim) From the late 1990s onwards, spectacular terrorist attacks and equally spectacular responses have lent credence to these hypotheses. Meanwhile, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)’s 1998/9 decision to attack Serbia without UN authorization challenged earlier concepts of world order and American President George Bush Jr’s 2003 decision to bypass the UN in invading Iraq undermined them even further. RMA technology helped Western coalitions overthrow the governments of Afghanistan and Iraq in short order. Since then, insurgents in both countries have plagued Western forces in ways that would have been familiar decades or even centuries earlier. In some circumstances, old principles remain lethally valid, and that may be what makes ongoing changes in military affairs most difficult to analyse.

Those who wish to understand such periods of uncertainty in military affairs do well to revisit classic works on strategy. If these works deserve their reputation, they reveal fundamental principles that will remain useful even as superficial assumptions disintegrate. This is why Thucydides dared to present his history of the Peloponnesian War as a ‘possession for all time’ (Thucydides 1997: 14). Even when classic teachings seem elliptical or dated, earlier writings on military problems can provide a useful foil for contemporary consideration of similar issues.

For those interested in contemporary war and statecraft, classic Chinese works on these topics are particularly relevant. China scholar John J. Fairbank made this point in the introductory chapter to a book on selected topics in Chinese military history. Fairbank begins by quoting from experts who hold that strategic studies must ‘become less military and more civilian … make greater use of political philosophy, economics and sociology, … [and] come to better terms with applied science’ (Fairbank 1974: 1). Fairbank goes on to state ‘In all these respects, the Chinese record offers opportunities unique in their possibilities of enlightenment because the Chinese historical record is unique’ (Fairbank 1974: 2).

Every country’s history is unique in its own way. China’s military tradition, however, impresses Fairbank as being exceptionally ‘fertile’ (Fairbank 1974: 2).

The inventors of the crossbow, cast iron, and gunpowder were also the inventors of paper and printing, civil service examinations, and bureaucracy. Among their many achievements, they early established the idea of civilian supremacy over the military, and China thereby acquired in Western folklore an undying reputation for pacifism. Yet no people before modern times has left so extensive a record of military institutions and exploits.

(Fairbank 1974: 2)

Fairbank adds that China’s classic works on strategy influence contemporary Chinese military thinkers. Therefore, ‘[s]tudy of the Chinese way in warfare can also ease the rest of the world’s necessary adjustment to China’s participation in the new transnational order’ (Fairbank 1974: 2). Sinologist Ralph Sawyer notes that Chinese strategic writings remain popular, not only in the contemporary Chinese military, but throughout the civilian world in China, Korea and Japan (Sawyer 1993: xii–xiii). Japanese writers, he notes, have shown a special penchant for applying Chinese strategic thought to such matters as business and personal relations (Sawyer 1993: xiii).

What Fairbank noted in the late twentieth century is even clearer in the early twenty-first. The need for a fresh perspective on warfare that takes a broad range of factors into account, addresses the importance of contemporary China and offers a fertile field of ideas is as great as ever, and the direct parallels between ancient Chinese problems and contemporary global ones are multiplying. Sun Tzu, Lao Tzu, Han Fei-Tzu, Confucius, and many other influential thinkers from the Chinese tradition wrote during the interregnum between the decline of the Chou dynasty and the rise of the Ch’in Empire. Theirs’ was also an era of social, political and technological flux. Like the thinkers of the early twenty-first century, they doubted the future of their civilization, and like the strategic analysts of the current time, they were acutely interested in the problems political and military leaders would face in navigating such change.

This book explores what classic Chinese writers contribute to twenty-first century strategic debates. The remainder of this chapter discusses this book’s approach to the subject. First, the author explains how he plans to use a number of key terms. Then the author explains why he describes twenty-first century military problems as postmodern. The author notes that those who must grapple with postmodern problems are particularly likely to benefit from revisiting earlier works in their field.

The section after that reviews existing literature on ancient Chinese strategic thought, noting that few authors have explored the contemporary relevance of Chinese writings. Those who have touched on this topic have interpreted Chinese thought narrowly, missing important points in the process. This book will explore the subject more thoroughly, in the hopes of providing a more useful and satisfying account. The next section discusses the problems of studying ancient Chinese works in English. A concluding section sums up the author’s approach, and presents an overview of the rest of the book.

Strategy defined

Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz defined strategy as ‘the use of engagements for the object of the war’ (Clausewitz 1976: 128). This book uses the word in the same spirit, but applies it in a broader context. Many ancient Chinese writers – notably Sun Tzu – treat the art of military campaigning as an inseparable part of the more general art of statecraft (Handel 1996: 31–3). Except where otherwise noted, the author uses the word strategy to mean what sticklers for linguistic precision might call ‘grand strategy’ – the art of using military, political and economic actions to support a political community’s goals in war and peace.

Rationality and rationalism

This book deals extensively with the concepts of rationalism and rational thought. Since this book contrasts the work of numerous thinkers, it is inevitable that some of these thinkers will define these concepts differently from others. To complicate matters yet further, few of these thinkers explicitly state their definitions. Therefore, the author qualifies and clarifies terms relating to rationality where appropriate. Later in this chapter, for instance, the author introduces the term ‘modernist rationalism’ to refer to a specific strand of rationalist thought.

Where the author uses the word ‘rational’ without elaboration, he follows the approach of the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy, which defines irrationality as ‘inconsistent thought’ and rationality, presumably, as the opposite (Cherniak 1998: 61). For the purposes of this book ‘consistent thought’ means thought which is consistent with the thinker’s other thoughts, the thinker’s understanding of reality and, where appropriate, the thinker’s goals. Since perfect consistency is difficult, if not impossible, to achieve, one must understand rationality as an aspiration and a matter of degree, not as an absolute condition or ‘a Procrustean bed into which genuine cognitive differences must be forced’ (Cherniak 1998: 63). The author intends this definition to be inclusive and flexible enough to justify the Encyclopaedia of Philosophy’s assertion that ‘to the extent that a belief is rational, it ought to be held’ (Cherniak 1998: 61).

The quest for greater rationality often leads to rationalism. ‘Rationalism’, the Encyclopaedia tells us, ‘is the view that reason, as opposed to, say, sense experience, divine revelation or reliance on institutional authority, plays a dominant role in our attempt to gain knowledge’ (Adler 1998: 75). This author adds that most of the rationalists he plans to discuss are also sceptical of emotion, intuition, judgement, common sense and all other intangible or non-systematic sources of ideas. The fact that rationalism depreciates ‘sense experience’ is significant, since it compels dedicated rationalists to address problems purely in terms of abstractions.

Ironists will note that since ‘sense experience’ seems to be the most consistent technique we have for apprehending a physical world which consistently seems to affect us, the strict application of rationalism is, by the previous paragraph’s definition of rationality, irrational. In human affairs, ignoring emotion, intuition and judgement may prove equally so. Strategy and politics certainly count as human affairs. These ironies provoked many of the ideas which this book plans to discuss.

Postmodernism defined

This book characterizes early twenty-first century military thought as postmodern. Postmodern thinkers have acquired – and even courted – a reputation for jargon and nonsense. This author hopes to break with that tradition. In order to use the concept of postmodernity more productively, the author will begin by explaining what he means by it.

The term ‘postmodernism’ can sound like an oxymoron. Since we normally use the word ‘modern’ to mean ‘the present day’, it is difficult to see how anything that currently exists can be ‘postmodern’. This idea makes more sense once one establishes that modernism, in this context, refers not to a historical period, but to a way of thinking about an issue. People approached certain problems in modernist and postmodernist ways millennia ago. People continue to use pre-modern approaches today. A single person can take a modernist approach to some issues while simultaneously taking pre-modern and postmodern approaches to others.

The first stage in thinking about an issue, according to this scheme, is what political theorist Leo Strauss described as the pre-philosophical approach (Strauss 1953: 82). Pre-philosophical thinkers accept the received wisdom of their own group without question (Strauss 1953: 82–3). The next stage of intellectual development comes when thinkers begin to probe their culture’s assumptions in order to distinguish the fundamental, the permanent and the objectively true from the superficial, the transient and the arbitrarily asserted. For the purposes of this study, we will also refer to this as the ancient philosophical form of thought.

Ancient philosophical thought begins by looking for the essential nature of things (Strauss 1953: 82–3). This questioning approach, however, leads one to wonder whether things have any fixed nature at all (Strauss 1953: 92). This query becomes more urgent as people develop new technology and new ways of conducting their affairs that render previously cherished assumptions about nature obsolete. Where ancient thinkers sought to find their place in a natural universe that may ultimately lie beyond human understanding, their successors develop an increasing appreciation for people’s ability to re-order that universe to suit their own purposes.

This confidence in human ingenuity leads thinkers to presume that since newer ideas and newer ways of doing things benefit from the most refinement, they will be the most reliable concepts and efficient procedures available. This is, in other words, a stage of intellectual development in which thinkers advocate modern approaches. That is why one refers to this stage of development as modernism. In this regard, a Roman consciously exploiting his people’s tactical and organizational improvements over the Greek phalanx is as much a modernist as a mid-twentieth-century commander consciously exploiting the improvements of armour, airpower and blitzkrieg doctrine over the methods of 1914.

Since modernists advocate progress, they advocate the attitudes they presume will promote progress. Modernism is, in the terminology of its postmodern critics, logocentric – centred upon rationality (Rosenau 1990: 86). This means, not merely that modernists try to avoid nonsense, prejudice and mawkishness, but that they have adopted a particular vision of rational thought – a vision that inclines them, not only towards rational-ity, but towards rational-ism. Modernists are certainly not content to accept the ancient philosophical idea that nature sets inherent limits on what humans can know and do. Nor are modernists willing to rely on such uncertain tools as intuition, inchoate personal experience or allegedly innate knowledge.

To the contrary, modernists seek to explain the phenomena that interest them in the comprehensive and objectively verifiable way that a mathematician might explain the relationship among factors in an equation or a mechanic might explain the relationship among gears in an engine. Modernists also tend to assume that their intellectual approach is superior to all others, and that those who fail to recognize its superiority will inevitably lose competitions with those who do. When the rich complexities of real life resist modernist dissection, modernists simplify their task by reducing the elements of those complexities to abstract and presumably universal concepts which they can manipulate more easily. Thomas Hobbes set a precedent for those who would follow this approach in political studies when he based his theory on a speculative account of how people might have behaved in a primeval world without government, even while acknowledging that ‘it may peradventure be thought, there was never such a time’ and admitting that, indeed, ‘it was never generally so’ (Hobbes 1946: 83).

At a minimum, this approach gives modernists a common language for discussing the phenomena that interest them. More ambitious modernists hope to predict the appearance and development of such phenomena. Yet more ambitious thinkers hope to predict such things with mathematical certainty. Ideally, the modernist approach would reveal practical ways to re-engineer the mechanisms that produce the relevant phenomena, thus allowing people to produce whatever effects they choose.

René Descartes, Francis Bacon, Immanuel Kant and Karl Popper rank prominently among the thinkers who have explored the broader implications of modernist rationalism. Readers seeking more extensive treatment of this theme may wish to begin with Fairlamb’s work Critical Conditions: Postmodernity and the Question of Foundations (Fairlamb: 1994). Students and practitioners of strategy may be particularly interested in the fact that modernists have enthusiastically applied their approach to the study of military and political decision making. Deborah Stone summarizes the modernist view of this topic in her work Policy Paradox and Political Reason:

The rational decision model portrays a policy problem as a choice facing a political actor. The actor is someone – an individual, a firm, an organization, or any entity capable of making a decision – who must choose a course of action in order to attain a desired end. The actor then goes through a sequence of mental operations to arrive at a decision. These steps are (1) defining goals; (2) imagining alternative means for attaining them; (3) evaluating the consequences of taking each course of action; and (4) choosing the alternative most likely to attain the goal.

(Stone 1988: 185)

For this model to work, one must get each of the steps right. One must define the problem accurately, choose genuinely desirable goals, identify all options for attaining them, and anticipate the full and precise consequences of each action. The model does not explain how to accomplish these things. One might re-apply the model to each decision that arises as one attempts to apply the model, but this merely multiplies the problem. Therefore, the modernist approach proves most effective in situations in which at least some of the steps are obvious.

If the steps actually are obvious, any sensible person will make the same decision every time s/he applies the model. Thus, if one assumes that most people will choose success rather than failure, one may use the model to predict other people’s behaviour. Taken to its extreme, logocentrism implies that all actions are pre-determined. In this spirit, the Jesuit Roger Boscovich and his intellectual successor Pierre Simon de Laplace suggested that we live in a ‘clockwork universe’ (Watts 1996: 109). People within this universe interact as mechanically and predictably as gears in a machine. The way of thinking that began by challenging what ancient philosophers saw as natural limits to human freedom ends up by denying that humans possess any meaningful freedom whatsoever.

The ability to optimize one’s own decisions and predict the decisions of others is attractive. Moreover, it often appears to be within reach. The steps in the rational decision-making process may never be self-evident, but they are seldom completely mysterious either. Political leaders may be maddeningly vague about their goals, but they generally have at least a broad idea of the types of outcomes they would prefer to achieve and the types of outcomes they would prefer to avoid. Military commanders seldom have time to consider every possible course of action, but they typically know what their most promising options are, and what the main costs and benefits of each choice are likely to be.

Therefore, much of the time, models of rational decision making work. The Research and Development (RAND) Corporation is well known for its use of such models to advise decision makers (Gray 1982: 129–30). Analysts from many other state-run and private agencies do the same. Many more tacitly operate on similar assumptions about logical decision making, whether or not they describe themselves as modellers.

Not only is the modernist model of decision making directly relevant to strategy, it serves as an example of the way modernists approach other intellectual challenges. Modernists typically approach problems by trying to define them as narrowly as possible, break them down into a sequence of even more narrowly defined steps, and work through those steps to produce one unequivocal solution. Modernist physicians attempt to classify diseases, identify their causes, diagnose individual patients as suffering from one specific ailment, and prescribe a treatment that counters whatever happens to cause that particular illness – a process which proves less straightforward than one might think in such fields as psychiatry (Bental 2003: passim). Tacticians use Operational Research to specify military problems, identify alternative ways of using various weapons to overcome those problems, measure the results of these alternative techniques, and use those measurements to find the optimum tactics for each battlefield situation. (Those seeking an introduction to military and civilian applications of Operational Research may review the literature of the OR Society, http://www.orsoc.org.uk/orshop/(fcuhkv55e2iczx45on05kly4)/orhomepage2.aspx.) This way of approaching problems inevitably over-simplifies the complexities of real life, but it offers one a way to navigate those complexities in the short term while holding out the ultimate promise of infallibility.

So far, the modernist approach has always fallen short of this promise. Its failures, when they come, have often been spectacular. Political scientists of the 1970s and 1980s used modernist concepts to forecast the future direction of the Cold War, but practically none of them anticipated the events of 1989 (Gaddis 1992: passim; Gaddis and Hopf 1993: passim). Colonel Harry Summers recalls an anecdote concerning analysts who attempted to use such models to improve America’s strategy in the Vietnam War. In 1969, the story goes, a group of American analysts developed a computer program to determine how long it wo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Ancient China on Postmodern War
• Cass Military Studies
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Historical background
• 3 From modernism to postmodernism in contemporary strategic thought
• 4 The nature of war
• 5 Waging war
• 6 Conclusion: thinking about strategy
• Bibliography