This chapter turns to the accounts of the campaigns of the Spring and Autumn Period (771–476 BC), followed by those of the Warring States Period (475–221 BC) that ended with the creation of the first imperial state in China in 221 BCE, and finally the campaigns that created, maintained, lost, restored and then permanently lost the Han dynasty (206 BC–AD 220). War for rulers, generals and statesmen required them to devise and execute strategies that were not ideal, often failed, and seldom accommodated higher moral values. This reality was portrayed clearly in most of the histories, even in the stylised and moralised anecdotes that are often all that is left to us.

The three earliest translators of Sunzi in the West – Father Amiot, Everard Calthrop, and Lionel Giles – all believed that the Chinese were fundamentally opposed to war, that Sunzi was a real person, and that his text was the paradigmatic expression of Chinese strategic thought. Samuel Griffith’s translation continued and spread this characterization into almost all of the scholarship on Chinese culture unopposed until the end of the twentieth century. Sunzi’s impact on Western strategic thought was limited before Griffith’s translation, something that has surprised many twentieth-century writers who found the Sunzi such an interesting book. Samuel Griffith tried and failed to find mentions of Sunzi in other European countries.

Sunzi was a household name by the 1980s and continued to establish itself in the popular imagination in the decades that followed. It was quoted and referred to in movies and television shows without explanation. Outside academic debates as to the universality of Sunzi as a work of strategy, it clearly symbolized the use of strategy for many people. While anyone could mention Sunzi to signal their interest in strategy, serious students of strategy put Sunzi together with Clausewitz to claim to know strategy from A to Z. Robert Asprey actively promoted Sunzi within military circles, both out of conviction of its value and because of his friendship with Samuel Griffith. John Boyd, a retired air force officer, developed his own approach to strategy that was influential mostly in the Marine Corps. Some of his supporters have called Boyd “the greatest strategist since Sunzi.”

Chinese guerrilla warfare would become connected to the United States Marines in two ways: the association of China Marines with Chinese military methods through Evans Carlson and Samuel Griffith, and the connection between the use of lightly armed, but highly motivated, marine units fighting in “guerrilla” style. In the year or so following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, a materially inferior United States Navy and Marine Corps managed narrowly to seize the initiative in the Pacific. Material inferiority required and highlighted the need for intelligent strategy as a force multiplier. In this early stage of the war, for a number of idiosyncratic reasons, a new marine unit, the Raiders, was created to strike back at the Japanese. The Raider Battalions, which would exist for only two years, had three notable military actions: the Makin raid, Edson’s Ridge, and the Long Patrol. As the Marine Corps expanded, and the war shifted, the Raiders were dissolved. Guerrilla warfare gave way to island hopping and amphibious assaults. The brief history of the Raiders was glorious, but, apart from Edson’s Ridge, of questionable value. Unlike Joseph Stilwell, the Raider Battalions took part in the battle for the Pacific that mattered to Americans.

Samuel Griffith went to New College, Oxford University, after retiring on March 1, 1956. He had made contact with Basil Liddell Hart by the middle of 1957, and Liddell Hart soon agreed to read and comment on Griffith’s dissertation. Liddell Hart made extensive comments on the dissertation as it was being read, and Griffith mentions reading Liddell Hart’s Strategy: The Indirect Approach. Griffith also believed that Chinese strategy was fundamentally different than Western strategy, with the possible exception of Liddell Hart’s strategy. Griffith also assumed, and consequently asserted without evidence, that Mao Zedong’s strategy was consistent with Sunzi. This was also due to Griffith’s connection between guerrilla warfare, Mao, and Sunzi, a connection that was particularly strong because he had translated Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare when he was in China. Griffith also asserted that Communist strategy, even before Mao, was based on Sunzi. It was also important for the dissertation to try to determine whether Sunzi had been influential in Western military thought before the twentieth century. Griffith’s biases, in addition to those of Liddell Hart, affected his choice of translation terms as much the introductory explanation of Sunzi.

Liddell Hart’s Foreword to Samuel Griffith’s 1963 translation of Sunzi is the locus classicus for the interpretation that Sunzi advocated an “indirect approach” to strategy. Liddell Hart asserted that Sunzi was the world’s greatest military thinker, with only Clausewitz comparable, if dated, and that much of the suffering caused by World War I and World War II would have been avoided if planners had absorbed some of Sunzi’s “realism and moderation” to balance Clausewitz’s theoretical emphasis on “‘total war’ beyond all bounds of sense.” Although Sunzi appeared in Europe with a French translation in the late eighteenth century, and appealed to the “rational trend of eighteenth-century thinking about war,” it was not influential because of “the emotional surge of the Revolution.” A new and complete translation was needed, particularly with the appearance of nuclear weapons, and with China becoming a great power under Mao Zedong.

Basil Liddell Hart created the term “indirect approach to strategy.” It was first articulated in 1927, and then appeared in its fully developed form in his 1929 book The Decisive Wars of History, which would eventually be republished as Strategy: The Indirect Approach in 1967. Liddell Hart’s views on warfare made him a controversial figure in the 1920s and 1930s, and his legacy after his death in 1970 remains unclear. For a time in the 1930s he was considered one of the greatest writers on war, if not thegreatest, at least in the Anglo-American world. His reputation collapsed at the beginning of World War II, but had recovered after the war so that by the late 1950s he was once again, at least in Samuel Griffith’s eyes, the most important strategist in the world. Today he is entirely unknown outside a very narrow academic community. His contributions to strategic thinking in the 1920s and 1930s were distorted by two factors: his commitment to preventing Britain from repeating its performance in World War I, and his need to earn a living as a writer. He took intellectual shortcuts, found the answers in history that he wanted to find regardless of the evidence, and argued for negotiating with Hitler during World War II. Liddell Hart had played an important role, along with his friend J. F. C. Fuller, in promoting mobile, mechanized warfare, particularly tanks.

The Art of War and Sunzi’s modern image outside China must be placed within their original Chinese context. The mythical author and “his” text served a specific function in Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian that, given the seminal nature of the Records of the Grand Historian in creating many of the categories and interpretations of pre-imperial and very early imperial history, have persisted until the present. Samuel Griffith connected Sunzi to Mao Zedong, the great Chinese military genius of the twentieth century, in order to make Sunzi relevant to Western readers. He also connected Sunzi back to ancient Chinese history to establish that, if Mao was the most recent manifestation of strategic acumen, the foundation of that thought was basic to Chinese culture. Sunzi was an ancient classic that was not only an enduring piece of strategic truth, but also a description of warfare in premodern China.

There are no Sunzi police to enforce an orthodox interpretation of The Art of War decided upon by an official Sunzi authority. But there was also no single author called Master Sun who wrote The Art of War with a unified, coherent meaning that could or can be uncovered or determined by careful study. Many hands wrote, compiled, and edited the work that would be attributed to the fictional Master Sun, and as a result it is complex, generally coherent, and displays several underlying lines of argument. The Art of War was interpreted differently by its many commentators starting in the third century CE and continuing to the present. Those interpretations were the product of their respective authors, and the times and places in which they wrote.

Speaking on the floor of the United States Senate in 2008 regarding her frustrations with the extensive, but ultimately, she feared, indecisive, discussions of the Climate Security Act, Senator Maria Cantwell remarked, “As Sun Tzu said in the ‘Art of War,’ ‘the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step’.”

The great recognition that Griffith’s translation received outside the sinological community completely shifted the place of Sunzi in the West. The coincidence of Griffith’s credibility as a marine with experience of China, the success of the Chinese Communists under Mao Zedong in the Chinese Civil War, and the more general rise of China as a major, and revolutionary, power, all made the Sunzi important in the West as it had never been before. The Western interpretation of Sunzi started from Griffith and Liddell Hart’s perspective, and was then influenced by the marketing of the work, by its perceived value in military education, and its use as a window into Chinese strategic culture. Griffith and everyone who followed him claimed that as a classic work of Chinese strategy it offered both profound strategic wisdom and insight into Chinese behavior. As a strategic work, a number of military and political leaders in the West called for it to be included into the curricula of military academies and officer training. And, absent any real knowledge of Chinese military history and strategic culture, the Sunzi could be substituted for a fully informed expert.

Joseph Stilwell’s career and campaigns in China present a counterexample to Samuel Griffith and unconventional war. Sunzi was essentialized into the Chinese way of fighting and used to encapsulate the problems facing Stilwell and excuse his inability to do more. One of the central messages of Barbara Tuchman’s account of Stilwell in China was that he accomplished what he did despite ferocious resistance from Chiang Kai-shek and the GMD. He was heroic because he achieved anything at all, defeating the Japanese Army at Myitkyina and building an impossible road through Burma. Yet Stilwell’s mission, like the American engagement with China more generally, was a failure. America could not overcome the reality of China under Chiang Kai-shek. China was “lost” to the Communists, who were also Chinese. Mao Zedong won by using Sunzi, but Chiang Kai-shek lost by using Sunzi. Chiang did not produce military writings validated by victory like Mao.

The Tang dynasty (618–907) went into steep decline as a result of the Huang Chao Rebellion (874–84). The imperial government and the emperor himself became the tools of regional warlords, each maneuvering for his own power in an increasingly uncertain political and military milieu. These struggles were played out in the final decades of the Tang dynasty and beyond, lasting until the mid-point of the tenth century, when the various factions and power groupings of the late Tang had become so enervated by constant warfare and the deaths of the principal players that a new generation of ambitious power-seekers rose to the top. Steppe influence remained important in these conflicts and indeed, from the retrospective standpoint of the Jurchen Jin dynasty (1115–1234) and then the Mongol Yuan dynasty (1272–1368), the intervening control of north China by the Chinese Song dynasty (960–1279) almost seems to be the exception rather than the rule.