The Many Ways of Chinese Warfare

Chinese military history, like the notion of an American Way of War, is critically important to current political and military debates in America. And like the notion of an American Way of War, it is subject outside of academia to extremely partisan discussion.

Here is how my four-year-old would articulate my position on "ways of warfare": I like it, but I don't like it. Similarly, Chinese military history is both a very old subject and a very young one. These dualities are not some sort of Daoist riddle but a reflection of the relationship of an extensive and ancient history to modern American academia. There is an enormous amount of mostly untapped historical records on war, military thinking, military technology, and every aspect of military history including military histories written by traditional Chinese historians. But very, very little of this has been exploited by post-1911 scholars in the West, Japan, or China. One of the very first military histories of China, edited by John Fairbank and Frank Kierman, was published in 1974 by Harvard University Press under the title Chinese Ways in Warfare. The editors hoped that their work would stimulate further study of the subject; sadly, little happened. The late Edward Dreyer's book Early Ming China: A Political History, 1355-1435 (Stanford University Press, 1982) was a stealth military history. Back then it was just possible to slip in the deeply despised military history under the rubric of the slightly less despised political history. But Ed was forced to tone down the military aspects to get it published.

Following a long-standing and persistent tradition in the West, Chinese Ways in Warfare characterizes the Chinese as fundamentally pacifistic. Consequently, the book argues that Chinese military thought is indirect and crafty, as opposed to the direct and straightforward Western way of warfare. That this is utter nonsense seems to have escaped many otherwise knowledgeable people. The repeated rise of vast, long-lived Chinese empires through bloody conquest, a feat no one could repeat in the West after Rome, was set aside in deference to the late Qing Dynasty's poor performance against the West in the 19th and 20th centuries. The situation of a particular time period was therefore projected over the whole of Chinese history, a subject that remains almost completely unknown in the West. People without military history must be pacifists, and since there was no military history, no military history could be written.

From Isabella Lucy Bird, The Yangtze Valley and Beyond: An Account of Journeys in China.… (London, 1899).

Any attempt to characterize a Chinese way of war must also fall afoul of the sheer vastness of Chinese history. While Robert Citino and Brian Linn have both argued convincingly that Germany and America, respectively, have particular ways of war, it is important to emphasize that both Germany and America have only existed as modern nation-states for a few centuries, about as long as one of China's major dynasties. Did all Chinese dynasties have the same military culture? It seems unlikely. At the same time, however, they all shared in a tradition of military thought and military history that influenced their military culture. Moreover, dynasties confronted different military problems at different stages in their existences. Their responses to the need to conquer territory and establish a dynasty did not resemble how they went about defending that territory from external or internal threats. The problem, as always when it comes to studying China, is making sense of something very large and complex, particularly in a way that nonspecialists can understand.

The strength of the ways of warfare approach is that it correctly emphasizes the critical idea that different groups fight differently; culture impacts war. The weakness, which is particularly apparent in the case of China, is that the approach can promote—indeed, it is sometimes configured precisely in order to do so—the idea that a culture, however defined, is monolithic, and has a single way of fighting, which remains the same over all time and under all circumstances. Certainly Victor Davis Hansen would argue...