A similar contrast exists in the case of China’s distinctive military theory. Its foundations were laid during a period of upheaval, when ruthless struggles between rival kingdoms decimated China’s population. Reacting to this slaughter (and seeking to emerge victorious from it), Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.

  The seminal figure in this tradition is known to history as Sun Tzu (or “Master Sun”), author of the famed treatise The Art of War. Intriguingly, no one is sure exactly who he was. Since ancient times, scholars have debated the identity of The Art of War’s author and the date of its composition. The book presents itself as a collection of sayings by one Sun Wu, a general and wandering military advisor from the Spring and Autumn period of Chinese history (770–476 B.C.), as recorded by his disciples. Some Chinese and later Western scholars have questioned whether such a Master Sun existed or, if he did, whether he was in fact responsible for The Art of War’s contents.31

  Well over two thousand years after its composition, this volume of epigrammatic observations on strategy, diplomacy, and war—written in classical Chinese, halfway between poetry and prose—remains a central text of military thought. Its maxims found vivid expression in the twentieth-century Chinese civil war at the hands of Sun Tzu’s student Mao Zedong, and in the Vietnam wars, as Ho Chi Minh and Vo Nguyen Giap employed Sun Tzu’s principles of indirect attack and psychological combat against France and then the United States. (Sun Tzu has also achieved a second career of sorts in the West, with popular editions of The Art of War recasting him as a modern business management guru.) Even today Sun Tzu’s text reads with a degree of immediacy and insight that places him among the ranks of the world’s foremost strategic thinkers. One could argue that the disregard of his precepts was importantly responsible for America’s frustration in its Asian wars.

  What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military. The great European military theorists Carl von Clausewitz and Antoine-Henri Jomini treat strategy as an activity in its own right, separate from politics. Even Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means implies that with war the statesman enters a new and distinct phase.

  Sun Tzu merges the two fields. Where Western strategists reflect on the means to assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses the means of building a dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion. Western strategists test their maxims by victories in battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become unnecessary.

  Sun Tzu’s text on war does not have the quality of exaltation of some European literature on the subject, nor does it appeal to personal heroism. Its somber quality is reflected in the portentous opening of The Art of War:

  War is

  A grave affair of the state;

  It is a place

  Of life and death,

  A road

  To survival and extinction,

  A matter

  To be pondered carefully.32

  And because the consequences of war are so grave, prudence is the value most to be cherished:

  A ruler

  Must never

  Mobilize his men

  Out of anger;

  A general must never

  Engage [in] battle

  Out of spite . . .

  Anger

  Can turn to

  Pleasure;

  Spite

  Can turn to

  Joy.

  But a nation destroyed

  Cannot be

  Put back together again;

  A dead man

  Cannot be

  Brought back to life.

  So the enlightened ruler

  Is prudent;

  The effective general

  Is cautious.

  This is the Way

  To keep a nation

  At peace

  And an army

  Intact.33

  What should a statesman be prudent about? For Sun Tzu, victory is not simply the triumph of armed forces. Instead, it is the achievement of the ultimate political objectives that the military clash was intended to secure. Far better than challenging the enemy on the field of battle is undermining an enemy’s morale or maneuvering him into an unfavorable position from which escape is impossible. Because war is a desperate and complex enterprise, self-knowledge is crucial. Strategy resolves itself into a psychological contest:

  Ultimate excellence lies

  Not in winning

  Every battle

  But in defeating the enemy

  Without ever fighting.

  The highest form of warfare

  Is to attack [the enemy’s]

  Strategy itself;

  The next,

  To attack [his]

  Alliances.

  The next,

  To attack

  Armies;

  The lowest form of war is

  To attack

  Cities.

  Siege warfare

  Is a last resort . . .

  The Skillful Strategist

  Defeats the enemy

  Without doing battle,

  Captures the city

  Without laying siege,

  Overthrows the enemy state

  Without protracted war.34

  Ideally, the commander would achieve a position of such dominance that he could avoid battle entirely. Or else he would use arms to deliver a coup de grâce after extensive analysis and logistical, diplomatic, and psychological preparation. Thus Sun Tzu’s counsel that

  The victorious army

  Is victorious first

  And seeks battle later;

  The defeated army

  Does battle first

  And seeks victory later.35

  Because attacks on an opponent’s strategy and his alliances involve psychology and perception, Sun Tzu places considerable emphasis on the use of subterfuge and misinformation. “When able,” he counseled,

  Feign inability;

  When deploying troops,

  Appear not to be.

  When near,

  Appear far;

  When far,

  Appear near.36

  To the commander following Sun Tzu’s precepts, a victory achieved indirectly through deception or manipulation is more humane (and surely more economical) than a triumph by superior force. The Art of War advises the commander to induce his opponent into accomplishing the commander’s own aims or force him into a position so impossible that he opts to surrender his army or state unharmed.

  Perhaps Sun Tzu’s most important insight was that in a military or strategic contest, everything is relevant and connected: weather, terrain, diplomacy, the reports of spies and double agents, supplies and logistics, the balance of forces, historic perceptions, the intangibles of surprise and morale. Each factor influences the others, giving rise to subtle shifts in momentum and relative advantage. There are no isolated events.

  Hence the task of a strategist is less to analyze a particular situation than to determine its relationship to the context in which it occurs. No particular constellation is ever static; any pattern is temporary and in essence evolving. The strategist must capture the direction of that evolution and make it serve his ends. Sun Tzu uses the word “shi” for that quality, a concept with no direct Western counterpart.37 In the military context, shi connotes the strategic trend and “potential energy” of a developing situation, “the power inherent in the particular arrangement of elements and . . . its developmental tendency.”38 In The Art of War, the word connotes the ever-changing configuration of forces as well as their general trend.

  To Sun Tzu, the strategist mastering shi is akin to water flowing downhill, automatically finding the swiftest and easiest course. A successful commander waits before charging headlong into battle. He shies away from an enemy’s strength; he spends his time observing and cultivating changes in the strategic landscape. He studies the enemy’s preparations and his morale, husbands resources and defines them carefully, and plays on his opponent’s psychological weaknesses—until at last he perceives the opportune moment to strike the enemy at his weakest point. He then deploys his resources swiftly and suddenly, rushing “downhill” along the path of least resistance, in an assertion of superiority that careful timing and preparation have rendered a fait accompli.39 The Art of War articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought America (though Hanoi usually translated its psychological gains into actual territorial conquests as well).

  In general, Chinese statesmanship exhibits a tendency to view the entire strategic landscape as part of a single whole: good and evil, near and far, strength and weakness, past and future all interrelated. In contrast to the Western approach of treating history as a process of modernity achieving a series of absolute victories over evil and backwardness, the traditional Chinese view of history emphasized a cyclical process of decay and rectification, in which nature and the world can be understood but not completely mastered. The best that can be accomplished is to grow into harmony with it. Strategy and statecraft become means of “combative coexistence” with opponents. The goal is to maneuver them into weakness while building up one’s own shi, or strategic position.40

  This “maneuvering” approach is, of course, the ideal and not always the reality. Throughout their history, the Chinese have had their share of “unsubtle” and brutal conflicts, both at home and occasionally abroad. Once these conflicts erupted, such as during the unification of China under the Qin Dynasty, the clashes of the Three Kingdoms period, the quelling of the Taiping Rebellion, and the twentieth-century civil war, China was subjected to wholesale loss of life on a level comparable to the European world wars. The bloodiest conflicts occurred as a result of the breakdown of the internal Chinese system—in other words, as an aspect of internal adjustments of a state for which domestic stability and protection against looming foreign invasion are equal concerns.

  For China’s classical sages, the world could never be conquered; wise rulers could hope only to harmonize with its trends. There was no New World to populate, no redemption awaiting mankind on distant shores. The promised land was China, and the Chinese were already there. The blessings of the Middle Kingdom’s culture might theoretically be extended, by China’s superior example, to the foreigners on the empire’s periphery. But there was no glory to be found in venturing across the seas to convert “heathens” to Chinese ways; the customs of the Celestial Dynasty were plainly beyond the attainment of the far barbarians.

  This may be the deeper meaning of China’s abandonment of its naval tradition. Lecturing in the 1820s on his philosophy of history, the German philosopher Hegel described the Chinese tendency to see the huge Pacific Ocean to their east as a barren waste. He noted that China, by and large, did not venture to the seas and instead depended on its great landmass. The land imposed “an infinite multitude of dependencies,” whereas the sea propelled people “beyond these limited circles of thought and action”: “This stretching out of the sea beyond the limitations of the land, is wanting to the splendid political edifices of Asiatic States, although they themselves border on the sea—as for example, China. For them the sea is only the limit, the ceasing of the land; they have no positive relations to it.” The West had set sail to spread its trade and values throughout the world. In this respect, Hegel argued, land-bound China—which in fact had once been the world’s greatest naval power—was “severed from the general historical development.”41

  With these distinctive traditions and millennial habits of superiority, China entered the modern age a singular kind of empire: a state claiming universal relevance for its culture and institutions but making few efforts to proselytize; the wealthiest country in the world but one that was indifferent to foreign trade and technological innovation; a culture of cosmopolitanism overseen by a political elite oblivious to the onset of the Western age of exploration; and a political unit of unparalleled geographic extent that was unaware of the technological and historical currents that would soon threaten its existence.

  CHAPTER 2

  The Kowtow Question and the Opium War

  AT THE CLOSE of the eighteenth century, China stood at the height of its imperial greatness. The Qing Dynasty, established in 1644 by Manchu tribes riding into China from the northeast, had turned China into a major military power. Fusing Manchu and Mongol military prowess with the cultural and governmental prowess of the Han Chinese, it embarked on a program of territorial expansion to the north and west, establishing a Chinese sphere of influence deep into Mongolia, Tibet, and modern-day Xinjiang. China stood predominant in Asia; it was at least the rival of any empire on earth.1

  Yet the high point of the Qing Dynasty also turned into the turning point of its destiny. For China’s wealth and expanse attracted the attention of Western empires and trading companies operating far outside the bounds and conceptual apparatus of the traditional Chinese world order. For the first time in its history, China faced “barbarians” who no longer sought to displace the Chinese dynasty and claim the Mandate of Heaven for themselves; instead, they proposed to replace the Sinocentric system with an entirely new vision of world order—with free trade rather than tribute, resident embassies in the Chinese capital, and a system of diplomatic exchange that did not refer to non-Chinese heads of state as “honorable barbarians” pledging fealty to their Emperor in Beijing.

  Unbeknownst to Chinese elites, these foreign societies had developed new industrial and scientific methods that, for the first time in centuries—or perhaps ever—surpassed China’s own. Steam power, railways, and new methods of manufacturing and capital formation enabled enormous advances in productivity in the West. Imbued with a conquering impulse that propelled them into China’s traditional sphere of dominance, the Western powers considered Chinese claims of universal overlordship over Europe and Asia risible. They were determined to impose on China their own standards of international conduct, by force if necessary. The resulting confrontation challenged the basic Chinese cosmology and left wounds still festering over a century later in an age of restored Chinese eminence.

  Beginning in the seventeenth century, Chinese authorities had noted the increasing numbers of European traders on the southeast China coast. They saw little to differentiate the Europeans from other foreigners operating at the fringes of the empire, save perhaps their particularly glaring lack of Chinese cultural attainments. In the official Chinese view, these “West Sea barbarians” were classified as “tribute envoys” or “barbarian merchants.” On rare occasions, some were permitted to travel to Beijing, where—if admitted into the presence of the Emperor—they were expected to perform the ritual kowtow: the act of prostration, with the forehead touching the ground three times.

  For foreign representatives the points of entry into China and routes to the capital were strictly circumscribed. Access to the Chinese market was limited to a tightly regulated seasonal trade at Guangzhou (then known as Canton). Each winter foreign merchants were required to sail home. They were not permitted to venture further into China. Regulations deliberately held them at bay. It was unlawful to teach the Chinese language to these barbarians or to sell them books on Chinese history or culture. Their communications were to take place through specially licensed local merchants.2

  The notion of free trade, resident embassies, and sovereign equality—by this point, the minimum rights enjoyed by Europeans in almost every other corner of the world—were unheard of in China. One tacit exception had been made for Russia. Its rapid eastward expansion (the Czar’s domains now abutted Qing territories in Xinjiang, Mongolia, and Manchuria) placed it in a unique position to threaten China. The Qing Dynasty, in 1715, permitted Moscow to establish a Russian Orthodox mission in Beijing; it eventually took on the role of a de facto embassy, the only foreign mission of its kind in China for over a century.

  The contacts extended to Western European traders, limited as they were, were seen by the Qing as a considerable indulgence. The Son of Heaven had, in the Chinese view, shown his benevolence by allowing them to partake in Chinese trade—particularly in tea, silk, lacquer-ware, and rhubarb, for which the West Sea barbarians had developed a voracious appetite. Europe was too far from the Middle Kingdom ever to become Sinicized along Korean or Vietnamese lines.

  Initially, the Europeans accepted the role of supplicants in the Chinese tributary order, in which they were labeled as “barbarians” and their trade as “tribute.” But as the Western powers grew in wealth and conviction, this state of affairs grew untenable.

  The Macartney Mission

  The assumptions of the Chinese world order were particularly offensive to Britain (the “red-haired barbarians” in some Chinese records). As the premier Western commercial and naval power, Britain bridled at its assigned role in the cosmology of the Middle Kingdom, whose army, the British noted, still primarily used bows and arrows and whose navy was practically nonexistent. British traders resented the increasing amount of “squeeze” extracted by the designated Chinese merchants at Guangzhou, through which Chinese regulations required that all Western trade be conducted. They sought access to the rest of the Chinese market beyond the southeast coast.

  The first major British attempt to remedy the situation was the 1793–94 mission of Lord George Macartney to China. It was the most notable, best-conceived, and least “militaristic” European effort to alter the prevailing format of Sino-Western relations and to achieve free trade and diplomatic representation on equal terms. It failed completely.