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Sun Tzu in the West: The Anglo-American Art of War

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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.

  •  
  • Provides an overview of the place of Sun Tzu's Art of War in Chinese history and culture
  • Shows that Sunzi has been used as a symbol of strategy, and has no recoverable 'true' meaning
  • For military history/strategy enthusiasts, as well as historians and scholars interested in China
Author: Lorge Peter
Publisher: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Pages: 237
ISBN: 9781108822466
Cover: Paperback
Edition Number: 1
Release Year: 2022

Acknowledgments
List of images
Introduction
1. A brief history of Sunzi in China
2. Journey to the West
3. The armchair captain
4. Stilwell, Chiang Kai-Shek and World War II
5. The China Marines
6. The captain who taught a general
7. 'The concentrated essence of wisdom on the conduct of war'
8. The reaction to Griffith's Sunzi translation
9. Robert Asprey, John Boyd and Sunzi
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

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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