Lifting the Veil of Conspiracy on Sun Tzu’s Art of War
July 4th, 2008 
criticism
AMONG THE FIRST, IF NOT THE FIRST, ARTICLE IN THE INTERNET TO BRING DOWN SUN TZU’S ART OF WAR FROM THE PEDESTAL
A very big THANK YOU to all StumbleUpon visitors for the overwhelmingly enthusiastic response to this article, beating all previous articles by a huge margin!
NOTE: This article has been expanded as a token of appreciation to StumbleUpon visitors.
Main article: The Art of War
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The beginning of The Art of War, in a “classical” bamboo book from the reign of the Qianlong Emperor. |
The Art of War is one of the oldest books on military strategy in the world. Written during the 6th century BC, it is ostensibly so perfect that there are hardly any criticism against it, if the results of Google search is to go by. Even though it was written some 25 centuries ago, it is said to be as relevant today as it was when first written. Critics have only praises for Art of War, putting even the Bible to shame.
The universal principles expounded by Sun Tzu have been admired for its timelessness, while proverbs such as “A stitch in time saves nine” has not been accorded the same attention, universal and timeless it may be. Reading the reviews of Art of War at Amazon.com, one cannot help but come to the inevitable conclusion that Sun Tzu was either God Incarnate or that God revealed Art of War to Sun Tzu in the same way that the Qur’an was revealed to Prophet Muhammad. BUT IS IT REALLY TRUE?
The test of the pudding is in the eating
Did Art of War provide the solution to the turbulent times in China that continued on until the unification of all the states in 221 BC by Qin Shi Huang (259-210 BC)? Wikipedia reports: “It is said the first emperor of a unified China, Qin Shi Huang, thought the book invaluable in ending the Age of Warring States.”
Sun Tzu said in Chapter 1, Laying Plans: “The art of war, then, is governed by five constant factors, to be taken into account in one’s deliberations, when seeking to determine the conditions obtaining in the field. These are: (1) The Moral Law; (2) Heaven; (3) Earth; (4) The Commander; (5) Method and Discipline. The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger… The commander stands for the virtues of wisdom, sincerity, benevolence, courage and strictness.” Was the cruel Qin Shi Huang a role model of such a ruler or commander? Wikipedia further says:
“The conventional view of Chinese history is that of a country alternating between periods of political unity and disunity and occasionally becoming dominated by foreign peoples… Successive dynasties in Chinese history developed bureaucratic systems that enabled the Emperor of China to control increasingly larger territory that reached its maximum extent under the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty and Manchurian Qing Dynasty.”
How is it that the foreigners could do better than the Chinese with their Art of War? And if we were to say that the Mongols and the Manchus do read Art of War too, are we also saying that they could understand Sun Tzu better than the Chinese?
And the last nail in the coffin got to be this: Chin-Ning Chu said in Preface and Introduction to The Art of War for Women: “Sun Tzu was not a military man when he wrote his art of war treatise. A farmer by profession and a self-taught philosopher, Master Sun descended from a Chinese scholar-military family…. Around 532 BC, Sun, then in his late teens, escaped to Wu (south of today’s Shanghai ) after his father—a warrior himself— rebelled against the ruling royalty. Sun Tzu hid out for twenty years…. As a young man, he wrote his Bing Fa (…translated throughout the centuries as The Art of War ) as a resume, in the hopes of getting a job as the King of Wu’s military commander.”
According to Wikipedia: “In the 8th century BC, power became decentralized during the Spring and Autumn Period … In this period, local military leaders used by the Zhou began to assert their power and vie for hegemony …In each of the hundreds of states that eventually arose, local strongmen held most of the political power and continued their subservience to the Zhou kings in name only… the control Zhou kings exerted over feudal princes was greatly reduced, the feudal system crumbled, and the Warring States Period began.”
It was a time in China when anyone who could win a battle could set himself up to be king. If Art of War is indeed so great, why then would Sun Tzu need to apply for a job as King of Wu’s military commander? Doesn’t it make Sun Tzu a traitor if he indeed originated from the state of Qi? And even if the above extract from Chin-Ning Chu is disputed, can anyone dispute the fact that Sun Tzu never became king, let alone Emperor? And should anyone point to the fact that Sun Tzu was a mere farmer then when he applied for the job, let it be pointed out also that Zhu Yuanzhang (1328–98), the founder and first Emperor of the Ming Dynasty of China, was also a peasant when he overthrew the Mongolian Yuan Dynasty in 1368.
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My thesis
My thesis is that Art of War has been grossly overrated. Art of War to me is just a book on military strategy and not THE book on military strategy. This can be discerned from the way the ancients treated Art of War. From the Song Dynasty onwards in the 11th century AD, Art of War was published together with six other strategy books as a military text book, known as The Seven Military Classics. Is it surprising then that if Art of War is THE book on military strategy, it should be printed together with six other strategy books? One would have thought that it could stand alone, with the other six strategy books published separately. And if Art of War is indeed one of the foundational works of strategic thinking and the most important, shouldn’t one think that it ought to be featured as the first essay in The Seven Military Classics (when lumped together), instead of being buried somewhere in the middle? Ralph D. Sawyer wrote in Barnes & Noble:
“The Seven Military Classics is one of the most profound studies of warfare ever written… In this volume are seven separate essays, written between 500 b.c. and a.d. 700, that preserve the essential tenets of strategy distilled from the experience of the most brilliant warriors of ancient China. Only one of these seven essays, Sun Tzu’s famous Art of War, has been readily available in the West.”
Could Art of War be so popular today WITHOUT Jean Joseph Marie Amiot, the French Jesuit who first translated it into the French language in 1782? Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have read it. Had Amiot chanced to choose a totally different essay in The Seven Military Classics, would that essay too have enjoyed the same popularity as Art of War today instead of the latter?
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Yinqueshan Han Slips: The only image available on the internet. Whether the bamboo strips relate to Art of War cannot be ascertained, and magnification shows that even the Chinese characters cannot be discerned. (c) NikerChina.com |
The Yinqueshan Han bamboo slips
The Yinqueshan Han Slips, ancient Chinese writing tablets made of bamboo strips, were discovered in 1972 in Tombs No. 1 and 2, southeast of the city of Linyi, Shandong. After restoration and arrangement, the slips were organised into a sequential order of nine groups and 154 sections. The first group included 13 fragment chapters from Sun Tzu’s Art of War, and 5 undetermined chapters.
Given the popularity of Sun Tzu’s Art of War, one would have thought that photographs of the bamboo strips would have been made readily available on the internet. A search revealed the only photograph on the right, and whether those strips pertained to Art of War cannot be ascertained. Isn’t there anyone in this world, including Sonshi.com, the largest website on Art of War in the world, who wants to know how Chinese scripts look like in the second century BC and what kind of ink they used that does not fade even after more than 2,000 years?
A check as to whether any radiocarbon dating had been done on those bamboo strips also returned zero in Google search. The time of burial for both Han tombs had been dated to about 140 BC/134 BC and 118 BC and so it must have been taken for granted that the bamboo strips were also from the same period. Isn’t this surprising, given that archaeological finds that have turned out to be mere forgeries are not uncommon?
A multi-purpose book
No doubt a pencil can be turned into a personal weapon, but who would do so except in a fit of anger? The Art of War as applied to business, sports, diplomacy, leadership, and personal lives has been popularized in American business and management texts. And I always thought that leadership under emergency situations are very different from leadership under normal circumstances. BBC speaks of Sir Winston Churchill: “In the event, he led [the Conservative Party] to one of their greatest ever defeats. It was also one for which he was partly responsible, because the very qualities that had made him a great leader in war were ill-suited to domestic politics in peacetime.”
The Art of War has also been applied to such unimaginable fields as managing your marriage, your children and your money. How about that for starters? My guess is that private investigation agencies are registering brisk business lately. A book originally intended to expound battle strategies has now being found suitable to manage your marriage, treating your spouse and children in like manner as you would your enemy. Can anything beat that? Sun Tzu might probably be laughing his heart out on the other side of the world. So commercialized has Art of War become today that as long as authors can make money, anything goes. To be sure, Erich von Däniken, in his book Chariots of the Gods?, picked and chose verses from the Bible, just as you would a buffet lunch, and “proved” that gods are actually space travellers.
Scott Savitz in The Masters of History says: “Modern-day military and political planners sometimes believe that new technology has invalidated traditional strategic thought and principles. The recent Persian Gulf War gives the lie to this assertion, although new aerial and missile technology altered tactics to a great extent. It is a testament to the power of great thought that much of the strategic credit for victory was given by Norman Schwarzkopf to a Chinese general, Sun Tzu, who had been dead for 2,500 years.” For such a dirty war where the United States military, via CNN, fooled the whole world (including their own American citizens) through a massive disinformation campaign, I too would readily hand over the credit to Sun Tzu rather than take it myself and be called a “dirty bastard”.
In THE KITSCH OF WAR: Misappropriations of Sun Tzu for an American Imperial Hypermasculinity, Ching-Chane Hwang says: “Indeed, the Bush Administration seems intent on using Sun Tzu’s The Art of War not only to justify its war on terror, generally, and the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, specifically, but also to project an imperial hypermasculinity onto all others, especially China, regardless of the evidence at hand.”
Sun Tzu’s Art of War has indeed proved extremely useful to authors, publishers, and military men alike. Is it any wonder then that there has hardly been any criticisms from them?
Forum debates
THE PURPOSE OF THIS ARTICLE IS TO PROVOKE THOUGHT. But if you are thinking of joining any forum to debate on whether Art of War has indeed been grossly overrated, DON’T is the best of my advice! My brother once advised me: “If someone says a particular restaurant is very popular, never say the food is nothing special even if that’s exactly how you feel. You will be heaped with insults like “you don’t have a taste for fine dining” and the like.” And this is exactly what happened to me when I participated in one forum that talked about Art of War .(NOTE: ekompute is dummiped, the first of several user-id given by my webhost and the one I use most often. In this particular blog, I used dummiped all the time to reflect my relationship with Dummipedia):
“Don’t read the book by its content. Read it for it’s meaning. Those who think that the book is solely about strategy for WAR, you’re wrong. Western (and Eastern) people had made use of the book in their management and business enterprises and who knows what else… As to why the book is out and available for both ally and the enemy… thus removing the advantage of making it a secret weapon… well, not many people will know how to use the knowledge gained… It’s the same analogy as everyone has wisdom, to use it wisely is another matter.” (REMARK: His underlying premise is that only he and a handful of others understand Art of War, and not even the enemy can do that. How egoistic can one be!)
and another message from the same forum:
“Hi ekompute, besides throwing out words you don’t understand, knowledge you never had and basically everything else you know crap about, what are you trying to prove to this blogger? Don’t come shoot me pulak, I know you have some kind of military training, and I can assure you that Malaysia is a peaceful country, we don’t like violence!” (Remark: Who is shooting who? )
And if you think that Sonshi.com, the largest website on Sun Tzu’s Art of War, is any different, let me tell you that it is just a church that sings Hallelujah to Sun Tzu:
“No matter what solution you come to from your questioning it will not change the usefulness of this book to those who find use within it…” (REMARK: This comment was made immediately after my first short post. What is there to discuss then other than to sing Hallelujah to Art of War when you participate in Sonshi forum? )
“You are subtly trying to convince people that the AoW is useless through pretentious questioning.” (REMARK: Is he telling me that Sonshi participants have no brain? Another participant mentioned: “Each of us has his/her own beliefs… and not unlike other prejudice, once ingrained, no matter what is presented, no one can change them from that perspective. At this point, we can only hope to respect each others differences without having to change each others perspective.” )
“I suggest you all stop replying to this guy. He simply doesn’t understand the AoW and is taking your words, twisting them in his mind, and then using that to convince himself further that he’s correct in his thinking. Anything you say is essentially convincing him he’s right and there is nothing on your end that will change that; he’s stuck in his opinion….”
“He’s just looking for a fight and using attacks on the AoW to incite [sic] one here. Also note how he refers to Sonshi by his forum status instead of his username in an attempt to be disrespectful. You’ll achieve nothing but bad things with this guy.”
Sonshi’s forum administrator says:
“ekompute, one of the things we encourage of our members is critical thinking. Thinking for themselves, and not to accept anything at face value. Conversely they need to be strong enough to handle criticism….” (REMARK: Action speaks louder than words. And like Animal Farm, there is an important, unspoken caveat. That encouragement is given, PROVIDED members sing Hallelujuah.)
“Yes, no book is perfect but you should have few doubts as to what book we feel is most important in the world. Sonshi.com was created because of that belief. Why? The Art of War has the answer to humankind’s conflicts, whether you’re talking about within the individual, home, community, nation, or world. We won’t rest until we see “the end of war”.” (REMARK: He can never rest then. Fancy the mere publishing of a website can achieve such lofty ideals! Is that the kind of strategy that Art of War REALLY taught? Words underlined is a tacit admittance that it is The Church of Sun Tzu. And like any church, never even try to question their beliefs. Either you join them or you stay out! )
