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

Revisionist history of the reception of the most important Chinese work on strategy, The Art of War, in the West.

Peter Lorge (Author)

9781108830652, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 November 2022

300 pages
23.5 x 15.9 x 1.9 cm, 0.51 kg

'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

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.

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.

Subject Areas: Military tactics [JWKT], Military history [HBW], Asian history [HBJF]