Chinese Just War Ethics: Origin, Development, and Dissent ed. by Ping-cheung Lo and Sumner B. Twiss (review)

To the question of whether or not ancient philosophy still speaks to us today, one significant answer is presented in the volume of collected papers, Chinese Just War Ethics: Origin, Development, and Dissent. Its collection of eleven pieces written by six authors directly confronts the question of the relevance of ancient Chinese philosophy in one specific area of inquiry, just war ethics. In the three sections of the book are analyzed the major philosophical traditions of ancient China: Part 1 on the Military Strategy tradition in which Sunzi's Art of War is prominent; Part 2 on the Confucian tradition, focusing on Mencius and Xunzi as well as on the neo-Confucian thinker Wang Yangming; and Part 3 on the traditions of Daoism, Mohism, and Legalism. But this book is not just another introduction to ancient Chinese philosophy (although it does an excellent job of that as well); rather, each of the chapters mines these foundational thinkers through the analysis of their specific ideas on just war ethics.

In his Introduction to the volume, Ping-cheung Lo notes that writings about war in ancient Greece mostly centered on narrative accounts of significant wars and battles, but ancient China was different, particularly in the Warring States period (475–221 b.c.e.) during which each of the ancient Chinese schools formed; he writes:

Most thinkers in the Warring States Period in China urgently engaged the topic of war. The cruel reality of unremitting wars was reflected in poems, recorded in historical writings, and, above all, intensely discussed and debated by thinkers of that age. Concomitant with the struggle for supremacy as well as for survival of the warring states, competing schools of thought, especially on statecraft, arose to meet the needs of the day. Because warfare was a part of statecraft, the role of warfare was sharply debated, ranging from its aggressive use to its condemnation. Hence there were heated and extensive debates on the need to distinguish justified from unjustified wars in ancient China, as there were not in ancient Greece.

(p. 4)

These collected contributions bring ancient Chinese thinkers into discussion and debate with modern just war theories. Most of them share a body of technical terminology developed from Western just war ethics, and they also share the conviction that these ancient Chinese ideas, taken altogether, demonstrate a powerful "just war tradition in China" (p. 29) that has not been adequately treated in previous scholarship and, thus, has not been sufficiently accounted for in contemporary just war theories.

The coverage and authorship of Chinese Just War Ethics are somewhat unusual for a collected volume of this sort. Each of the chapters has been developed by their authors throughout a series of conferences (listed in the "Preface") on just war ethics, four of which were sponsored by Hong Kong Baptist University. Of its eleven chapters, nine have been previously published, the two exceptions being the "Introduction" by Lo and chapter 10 on Mozi by Hui-chieh Loy. In addition to the "Introduction," Lo has written two chapters on the Military Strategists and the final chapter on the Legalist tradition. Three of the four chapters on the Confucian tradition were co-authored by Sumner B. Twiss and Jonathan K. L. Chan, and Ellen Zhang authored the chapters on the Daoist tradition. Thus, most of the chapters appear to have been developed through direct and extensive dialogue with each of the others, and this explains the structural similarities, the shared approaches, and the shared technical terminology from contemporary just war theory that characterizes each of them. This provides the volume its own distinctive identity that gives each of the ancient Chinese thinkers an individual position within their own tradition yet also places them in clear relation with the thinkers of the other traditions. The volume holds together in a way very different...