John F Sullivan

It's extremely dense and theoretical material, but it is also relatively well-written and you can clearly see its influences in the Marxist ideology being put forth in Xi Jinping Thought. It is worth careful study if we want some insight into the foundation of curent CCP thinking.

Technically the book is a group effort, but Wang was its lead editor and authored its opening two and closing chapters. It is also massive, clocking in at over half a million characters. It is organized around 15 Marxist "principles" which each merit their own detailed chapter.

On the one hand we lament that what CCP leadership thinks is an unknowable black box, yet on the other hand we’ve never even bothered to translate Wang Huning’s magnum opus on the principles of Marxist political thought, a work that heavily influenced Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, & Xi Jinping …

Xi’s comments were made in a July 29, 2013 speech he made to the senior officers of the Beijing Military Region titled “Focus on Achieving the Party’s Strong Military Goal Under New Circumstances and
Comprehensively Strengthen Military Construction.”

and generally contrasts it with the fall of the Soviet Union when the military failed to defend the crumbling Soviet regime. It remains a seminal event and warning which they continue to reference internally, but not one they are willing to debate or commemorate openly.

Xi Jinping doesn’t publicly acknowledges the June 4th Tiananmen crackdown, but in internal speeches to his military leaders he does bring it up as an example where the PLA was severely tested & passed. He usually refers to it as the “political turmoil (政治风波) in spring of 1989

The king invites the praised governor ostensibly to honor him, but according to Sima Guang’s account “boils him alive, along with the ministers who had praised him. As a result the vassals were filled with fear, none dared to engage in deceit, and all exerted themselves honestly”

The king now knows the truth. The "praised" governor neglects his domain and diverts all its funds to bribe the king's ministers to fraudulently promote him. The "vilified" governor uses funds to better his own domain and fails to send kickbacks to the king's corrupt ministers.

King Wei of Qi had two governors—one praised to the sky by the king's ministers, the other ceaselessly vilified by the same officials. He dispatches trusted aides to discover the reason. The vilified governor runs an efficient domain, the praised governor runs a decrepit one ...

History of the Warring States《戰國史》by Yang Kuan (楊寬) Partial Translation (Chap. 1-3) Translation of the first three chapters of of Yang Kuan's classic history of the Warring States era.

Draft translation of Chapters 1-3 posted here:

academia.edu/129661606/Hist…戰國史_by_Yang_Kuan_楊寬_Partial_Translation_Chap_1_3_

If you have a better source covering Warring States era iron smelting and carbonized steel technology, by all means continue to reference that, but for the rest of us, Yang Kuan's book is the only window we have into this and many other interesting topics.

Got tired of waiting for somebody (anybody!) to get around to translating Yang Kuan's classic history of the Warring States era, so finally just did it myself. A link to the first three chapters is posted below if anyone is interested.

However, from the perspective of historical philology, we cannot treat it as a mystical and poetic work, but instead must demand that we understand its true nature within a specific historical context.”

— Li Ling “Sunzi’s Thirteen Chapters: A Comprehensive Study” (2006)

Li Ling: “Some foreign military scholars hold Sun Tzu in extremely high esteem … Sometimes, their high praise surprises even us [Chinese]

…

Chinese Military Actions Dataset -- Spring and Autumn Era (722 -468 BCE) Working on a project to build a searchable database for every documented Chinese military action from both the Spring & Autumn and Warring States eras. Goal is to eventually cover all 500 years fr...

individual military actions, because I believe this is an important element most modern interpreters dismiss in their translations. Attack (伐) is different than Invasion (侵) which is different than Battle (戰) etc.

You can access it here:

www.academia.edu/41495215/Chi...

I’ve include a couple features I hope are useful in making sense of it. The major states are color coded to make clear the “patterns of conflict” present in a very complex diplomatic environment. I also clearly label the specific terminology the text uses to classify

For anyone who might be interested in the Zuozhuan as military history but find it too time consuming, complicated, or expensive (all legitimate complaints), I do have a distillation of the over 600 military actions it documents in a report you can freely access.

Gu an Zhu's book does have a brief section covering Sun Tzu's military thinking in relation to the era, but I argue that there are significantly more linkages between the advice found in Art of War and specific military campaigns covered in the Zuozhuan than previously examined.

I cite their work heavily in the book I’m working on covering the same era but focusing on the strategic and military aspects of the Spring & Autumn period and how it influenced Sun Tzu’s Art of War.

bsky.app/profile/john...

They do an excellent job of clearly narrating the complex political, diplomatic & military dynamics while weaving in the broader cultural & philosophical influences that the decline of the Zhou system unleashed. Here is an example of how they explain the 632 BC Chengpu campaign:

Unfortunately, there is no available English language history of China's extremely influential Spring & Autumn era (770-453 BC), but there are some excellent Chinese language sources. Perhaps the best is "Spring & Autumn History" by Gu Derong (顾德融) and Zhu Shunlong (朱顺龙).

Overall, though, it's an interesting book and he devotes a chapter to each of the individual elements within the systematic framework. It is a good primer on these early strategic concepts. Unfortunately, though, there is no readily available English translation.

Here is how he explains it in the book. I would quibble at SOFTNESS being the sole core without its corresponding dialectal pair, HARDNESS. After all, water can move boulders but it can't (quickly) destroy them. You still need the hardness of the grindstone smashing into the egg.

Hong Bing's book, "Analysis of Chinese Strategic Principles" 《中国战略原理解析》has a useful framework to think about the foundation of early Chinese strategic thought. I have reproduced the graphic from his text here:

I think we need to relook this assumption. We over-hype the "strategic" emphasis of Sun Tzu and too easily fall into a false belief that thousands of years ago a solution to complex strategic problems was solved. It wasn't, and we need to view this text more realistically.

This is the main premise of Michael Handel's argument, which remains influential in current PME teaching, that Sun Tzu's text is much more "strategic" than Clausewitz, reflecting a significant cultural difference between Eastern & Western approaches to war.

Is it better to view Sun Tzu's Art of War as a method of strategic thinking using the modern definition of STRATEGY or instead a reflection of the original Greek meaning of STRATEGOS, indicating the purview of the general but not necessarily covering broader political themes ...

His argument for how the supposed core Sun Tzu concept of “winning without fighting” has long been distorted to the point where it no longer resembles anything close to the text’s original purpose or historical context is a necessary corrective too rarely addressed in our own discourse.

It is truly a tragedy that the Chinese speaking world has ready access to provocatively engaging, philological & historically grounded Sun Tzu analysis like Huang Pumin’s book, while the English speaking world is left to suffer through Derek Yuen’s “Deciphering Sun Tzu.”

Huang Pumin: “Profit (利) runs like a red thread through The Art of War. One should rely on all useful methods to destroy the enemy and preserve oneself. Thus, Sun Tzu proposed that when to wage war and how to conduct it depends on 'profit'—whether war benefits oneself.”