Warfare in Chinese History (review)

A conventional disparagement of China as a military force to be reckoned with, produced by Westerners at the dawn of nineteenth-century imperialism, has for some time prevailed in academic circles without much serious interrogation. Recently, however, a small but persistent group of scholars has been working to overcome the old assumptions about China's perennial reluctance to wage war and its inability to do so effectively. As Jeremy Black points out in his cogent conclusion to this essay collection, even a cursory examination of Chinese history demonstrates the fallacy of the first premise, while the second is the result of "reading back from 1860" and from a perspective that privileges technology and Western modes of warfare (p. 440). In a similar vein, Hans van de Ven's able introduction also points out the need to move beyond many current assumptions about Chinese military history, notably the notion of a sharp separation between the civil and military spheres.

This collection, the result of a conference held at Cambridge University in December 1997 that itself forms part of a multi-year series on different aspects of Chinese military history, aims expressly to take its place beside Kierman and Fairbank's Chinese Ways in Warfare, the classic collection of essays published over a quarter century ago.¹ While it matches the earlier volume in terms of the span of time and the range of topics covered, the work under review has the added advantage that the authors have been able to consult an enormous amount of archival and newly published material that was simply unavailable to researchers in the 1970s.

The quality of the essays and the research upon which they are based is uniformly high, despite a degree of unevenness usual in all anthologies. Some common themes include the relevance of nonnative input, including that of the Tang ruling house; the significance of naval warfare; the interrelated roles of both foreign and economic policy; the part played in Chinese strategic thinking by Mongols and others located along China's internal borders; the important strategic juxtaposition of frontier and interior; and the symbolic and practical significance of the notion of "national" unity. Below I briefly summarize each essay in turn.

The volume opens with a piece by Mark Lewis, "The Han Abolition of Universal Military Service" (pp. 33-76), which sets the tone. After the abolition of universal military service, a consequence of sustained unity, the Han used three main expedients to maintain their capacity to employ military force: the use of barbarians and convicts as primary sources of recruitment, the relative demilitarization of the interior (for the risks inherent in an armed peasantry were insupportable) and concentration of armed forces on the frontiers, and the formation of professional armies in standing commands (p. 75). The recurrence of these expedients throughout later Chinese history prompts Lewis to observe that "in military affairs as in so many other aspects of government, the Han dynasty established a pattern . . . for later dynasties" (p. 76). Lewis makes the important point that demilitarization of the population was a necessary concomitant of the abolition of universal military service because otherwise emperors would lose a major source of their own power and lay themselves open to challenges from local power (p. 49).

The title of David Graff's essay, "Dou Jiande's Dilemma: Logistics, Strategy, and State Formation in Seventh-Century China" (pp. 77-105), understates its rich content. As part of a detailed discussion of the strategic considerations underlying a number of confrontations in the early Tang, he analyzes the relationship of military power to state formation under the Tang, noting in particular the persuasive authority of the mantra of unity, which in practical terms meant that contenders for power tended to surrender or to join the victor after a single defeat. The key to state formation, in other words, was the building of coalitions. Perhaps the most fascinating part of this essay is Graff's discussion of the leading role played...