Overview

It would be hard to overstate the impact of Sun Tzu's The Art of War on military thought. Beyond its impact in Asia, the work has been required reading in translation for US military personnel since the Cold War. Sun Tzu has been interpreted as arguing for 'Indirect Strategy' in contrast to 'Direct Strategy,' the latter idea stemming from Ancient Greece. This is a product of twentieth-century Western thinking, specifically that of Liddell Hart, who influenced Samuel B. Griffith's 1963 translation of Sun Tzu. The credibility of Griffith's translation was enhanced by his combat experience in the Pacific during World War II, and his translation of Mao Zedong's On Guerrilla War. This reading of Sun Tzu is, however, very different from Chinese interpretations. Western strategic thinkers have used Sun Tzu as a foil or facilitator for their own thinking, inadvertently engaging the Western military tradition and propagating misleading generalizations about Chinese warfare.

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9781108830652

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Reviews

'In this lively, engaging and terrific book, Peter Lorge tells the fascinating and untold story of just how Sun Zi came to be perhaps most well-known strategist in the West today. Along the way, Lorge details the many ways in which Sun Zi's Art of War has been misread and misused - and how its connection to China and Chinese military history have been, ironically, overlooked. Anyone with an impulse to either quote or invoke Sun Zi, or use him to understand China's current military strategy, should read this book first.' M. Taylor Fravel, Massachusetts Institute for Technology 'Sun Tzu in the West is about much more than the reception of this outstandingly influential Chinese classic in Europe and America. This comprehensive work unearths the work's origins and follows its interpretations in China and Japan. Finally the scholarly work we can trust!' Beatrice Huser, University of Glasgow 'For anyone curious how a 2,500-year-old Chinese text became synonymous with 'strategy' on battlefields and in boardrooms, Peter Lorge's remarkably lucid and exhaustively researched book comes as a welcome surprise. East meets West and myth becomes reality in a tale full of appropriation and misinterpretation. It is a timely warning against othering and essentializing a civilization as old and complex as China's.' Matthew Polly, best-selling author of American Shaolin and Bruce Lee: A Life

Author Information

Peter Lorge is Associate Professor of Pre-Modern Chinese and Military History at Vanderbilt University. His previous books include Chinese Martial Arts: From Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century and The Asian Military Revolution.

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