Non Fiction Authors From China

"是故勝兵先勝而後求戰，敗兵先戰而後求勝。"

"微乎微乎，至於無形；神乎神乎，至於無聲；故能為敵之司命。"

"人皆知我所以勝之形，而莫知吾所以制勝之形。"

"故形兵之極，至於無形，無形，則深間不能窺，上智不能謀。"

"故善戰者，至人而不至於人。"

"故敵逸能勞之，飽能飢之，安能動之。出其所不趨，趨其所不意。"

"不遇敵者，必戰無不勝，但每次交鋒，終必敗北。"

"Water shapes its course according to the nature of the ground over which it flows; the soldier works out his victory in relation to the foe whom he is facing. Therefore, just as water retains no constant shape, so in warfare there are no constant conditions. He who can modify his tactics in relation to his opponent and thereby succeed in winning, may be called a heaven-born captain."

"故其疾如風，其徐如林，侵掠如火，不動如山，難知如陰，動如雷霆。"

"故用兵之法，無恃其不來，恃吾有以待之；無恃其不攻，恃吾有所不可攻也。"

"數賞者，窘也；數罰者，困也；"

"In war, numbers alone confer no advantage. Do not advance relying on sheer military power."

"令素行以敎其民，則民服。令不素行以敎其民，則民不服。令素行者，與民相得也。"

"將弱不嚴，敎道不明，將之過也。"

"故戰道必勝，主曰無戰，必戰可也；戰道不勝，主曰必戰，無戰可也；"

"進不邀功，退不避罪，唯人是保，而利合於主，國之寶也。"

"視卒如愛子，故可與之俱死。"

"吾士無余財，非惡貨也。無余命，非惡壽也。"

"兵之情主速，乘敵所不及，由不虞之途，攻其所不備也。"

"施無法之賞，懸無政之令。犯三軍之眾，若使一人。"

"非利不動，非得不用，非危不戰。主不可以怒而興師，將不可以慍而致戰；合于利而動，不合于利而止。怒可以復喜，慍可以復悅，亡國不可以復存，死者不可以復生。故明君慎之，良將警之，此安國全軍之道也。"

"敵間之來間我者，因而利之，導而捨之，故反間可得而用也；"

"故明君賢將，所以動而勝人，成功出於衆者，先知也。"

"故三軍之事，莫親於間，賞莫厚於間，事莫密於間"

"此兵之要，三軍之所恃而動也。"

"Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across."

"Engage people with what they expect; it is what they are able to discern and confirms their projections. It settles them into predictable patterns of response, occupying their minds while you wait for the extraordinary moment — that which they cannot anticipate."

"Victory is reserved for those who are willing to pay its price."

"Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer."

"Strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat."

"The true objective of war is peace."

"Opportunities multiply as they are seized."

"In peace, prepare for war. In war, prepare for peace."

"Fear is the true enemy, the only enemy."

"吳王曰：「將軍罷休就舍，寡人不願下觀。」孫子曰：「王徒好其言，不能用其實。」於是闔廬知孫子能用兵，卒以為將。西破彊楚，入郢，北威齊晉，顯名諸侯，孫子與有力焉。"

"諸將效首虜，（休）畢賀，因問信曰：「兵法右倍山陵，前左水澤，今者將軍令臣等反背水陳，曰破趙會食，臣等不服。然竟以勝，此何術也？」信曰：「此在兵法，顧諸君不察耳。兵法不曰『陷之死地而後生，置之亡地而後存』？且信非得素拊循士大夫也，此所謂『驅市人而戰之』，其勢非置之死地，使人人自為戰；今予之生地，皆走，寧尚可得而用之乎！」諸將皆服曰：「善。非臣所及也。」"

"Sun Tzu’s success teaches us that a successful general is one who fully calculates his approach and plans to fight in a battle. However, the average reader is not able to identify Sun Tzu’s teachings on a deeper or philosophical level. This is my reason for writing and exegeses on the Art of War."

"It seems to me that The Art of War codifies the principles of kung fu, the martial arts: to co-operate with the enemy, to prevent all-out war when possible. I remember reading a lot of pages devoted to fighting with fire, and burning down cities. Devotion to tactics rather than ethics. I have a figurine of Gwan Goong, god of war and literature, reading a book. That book is The Art of War."

"By contrast, classical China produced many great generals, fought many wars and conquered many peoples but did not elevate military values above civilian. (It helped, perhaps, that the scholars rather than the military wrote the histories.) Fighting was not held up as something admirable but rather as the result of a breakdown in order and propriety. There is no equivalent of the Iliad in Chinese literature and the heroes held up for the young to emulate were the great bureaucrats and wise rulers who maintained the peace. Early on Chinese thinkers such as Confucius and the great strategist Sunzi (also known in the transliteration Sun Tzu) stressed that the state’s authority rested on its virtue as well as on its ability to use force. And for Sunzi, the greatest general was the one who could win a war, through manoeuvre or trickery, without fighting a battle. Prestige in Chinese society came rather from being a scholar, poet or painter; and from the Tang dynasty onwards the examination system to enter the imperial civil service was the favoured path for fame and prestige. Successful generals were sometimes awarded a scholar’s rank and gown as a mark of particular favour where many European societies would have given military decorations to meritorious civilians."

"In the famous Chinese treatise The Art of War, Sunzi laid down precepts which succeeding generations studied carefully, among them the famous ‘Know the enemy and know yourself, and you can fight a hundred battles with no danger of defeat’ and ‘He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.’ He also had specific advice, with lists of key factors, situations or types of actions, on the various phases of war, from making the plans to choosing the right terrain to fight. From the Qin Emperor to Mao Zedong, The Art of War has provided leaders throughout China and Asia with guidelines for how to win a war. General Vo Nguyen Giap, the architect of Vietnam’s victories against the French in the 1950s and the Americans a decade later, was an admirer, as are the Western business people who have flocked to buy The Complete Sun Tzu for Business Success: Use the Classic Rules of The Art of War to Win the Battle for Customers and Conquer the Competition or The Art of War for Women: Sun Tzu’s Ancient Strategies and Wisdom for Winning at Work. Perhaps they like his assertion that ‘All warfare is based on deception’ or enjoy his passages on the importance of the strong leader for victory, and it must help that The Art of War itself is short and consists of pithy maxims."

"The one thing missing from The Art of War is love, ... any sense of altruism, any sense of loving your neighbor. It's just a[bout] how to take advantage of your neighbor, how to triumph over your neighbor, how to manipulate your neighbor. I'm sorry... It's a very nasty book. How to use your spies — that chapter thirteen on spies — is chilling. The whole book — of course it's very clever, and of course a lot of it is very true, and of course we can go through life treating people in that way if you want to, but I don't happen to believe that's the best way to go. ... The Lúnyǔ [Analects of Confucius] is a superior book to Sūnzi bīngfǎ [The Art of War] because the Lúnyǔ talks about morality, talks about caring for your fellow human being; after all, the whole idea of ren ... doesn't come in Sūnzi bīngfǎ at all. Sūnzi bīngfǎ is: how to use your friends and neighbors in order to get the better of them. That doesn't make me feel good. I'm an old-fashioned kind of guy, and I believe in being nice to people whenever I can. ... You don't go out of your way like Sun Tzu to manipulate everybody including your friends. For me, Sūnzi bīngfǎ is the dark side of Chinese culture. It's the dark side. And, I know it's there. And there's a dark side to Western culture too. And, therefore, it's important to be aware of it, but not to be corrupted by it. Not to be polluted by it. Because it is a very powerfully-polluting little book. Very nasty little book. Let's not pretend otherwise."

"The legacy that Mao Zedong left for his successors was thus a most ambiguous and contradictory one, marked by a deep incongruity between the Maoist regime's progressive socioeconomic accomplishments and its retrogressive political characteristics. On the one hand, Mao "created a nation," as Deng Xiaoping said, completing in the early years of the People's Republic many of the unfinished tasks of the Guomindang's abortive bourgeois revolution. The Maoist regime also established some of the preconditions for socialism. It began China's modern industrial revolution; it abolished private ownership of the means of production, a necessary if by no means sufficient condition for socialism; and it kept alive (far longer into the postrevolutionary era than might have been anticipated) a vital socialist vision of the future. On the other hand, Maoism retained essentially Stalinist methods of bureaucratic political rule; it generated its own cults, orthodoxies, and dogmas and it consistently suppressed all intellectual and political dissent. Mao Zedong, to be sure, looked upon the Communist bureaucracy as a great evil, but the only remedy he could devise to control his own creation was to rely on his personal prestige and the force of his own personality. Neither in theory nor in practice does the Maoist legacy include meaningful institutional safeguards against bureaucratic domination."

"Although it has become unfashionable to recall the accomplishments of Mao’s time, it remains the case that the Maoist regime made immense progress in bringing about China’s modern industrial transformation, and it did so under adverse internal and external conditions. Without the industrial revolution of the Mao era, the economic reformers who rose to prominence in the post-Mao era would have had little to reform. Of the Chinese people, Mao’s industrial revolution demanded hard labor and great sacrifices, as had been the case in the industrialization of Japan and Russia in earlier times. Popular consumption and living standards suffered as the Communist state appropriated ever larger shares of the surplus to finance the expansion of the modern industrial plant. The state, simply put, exploited the people it ruled, especially the peasantry in order to build a heavy industrial base and to support the growing bureaucracy that presided over it. But it is not the case, as some of the more zealous champions of the market have suggested, that the Chinese people did not materially benefit during the years of Maoist industrialization. To be sure, China’s sharply rising national income did not translate itself into corresponding increases in income for the working population, whose labor was responsible for the rise. Some of the increase was absorbed by a rapidly growing population, partly the result of the ineffectiveness of belatedly implemented birth control policies. However, most of the surplus flowed into state coffers (and from there to the modern industrial sector and its bureaucracy), leaving only enough for meager increases in popular income over the last two decades of the Maoist regime. While the income of state employees, including regular factory workers, rose significantly during the late Mao period, the income of peasants, who made up 75 percent of the laboring population, increased little, if at all, after 1957. Yet among gains not easy to quantify in economic calculations, but vital for measuring popular welfare, one must note the vast expansion of schools and educational opportunities during the Mao era, the transformation of a largely illiterate population into a mostly literate one, and the building of a relatively comprehensive health care system where none existed before. The near doubling of average life expectancy over the quarter-century of Mao’s rule – from an average of thirty-five in pre-1949 China to sixty-five in the mid-1970s – offers dramatic statistical evidence for the material and social gains that the Communist Revolution brought to the great majority of the Chinese people. Upon completing his monumental history of the Soviet Union, the great English historian E. H. Carr warned: “The danger is not that we shall draw a veil over the enormous blots on the record of the Revolution, over its cost in human suffering, over the crimes committed in its name. The danger is that we shall be tempted to forget altogether, and to pass over in silence, its immense achievements.” Carr’s words deserve to be pondered by students of modern Chinese history as well as Russian history, for revolutions do not easily lend themselves to balanced appraisals. Great social upheavals typically arouse great and unattainable expectations, and when those high hopes are dashed long periods of disillusionment and cynicism inevitably follow, while the actual historical achievements are ignored or forgotten. It usually takes several generations, far removed from the political and ideological battles of the revolutionary epoch, to bring the historical picture back into focus. It is the blots on the Maoist record, especially the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution, that are now most deeply imprinted on our political and historical consciousness. That these adventures were failures colossal in scope, and that they took an enormous human toll, cannot and should not be forgotten. But future historians, without ignoring the failures and the crimes, will surely record the Maoist era in the history of the People’s Republic (however else they may judge it) as one of the great modernizing epochs in world history, and one that brought great social and human benefits to the Chinese people."

"Among the distinguishing features of the Mao period, many observers once believed, was a unique attempt to reconcile the means of modem industrialism with the ends of socialism. That, no doubt, was Mao's aim, and it certainly was the Maoist claim. But, in the end, Mao Zedong was far more successful as an economic modernizer than as a builder of socialism. This judgment, of course, does not accord with the conventional wisdom of the day, which tells us that Mao sacrificed "modernization" to "ideological purity" and that economic development was neglected as the late Chairman embarked on a fruitless quest for a socialist spiritual utopia. The actual historical record conveys a rather different story, and it is essentially a story of rapid industrialization. The post-Mao critiques of the Maoist economic legacy, which dwell less on the accomplishments than on the deficiencies of the era, nonetheless reveal that the value of gross industrial output grew thirty-eight-fold during the Mao period, and that of heavy industry ninety-fold, albeit starting from a tiny modern industrial base whose output had been halved by the ravages of foreign invasion and civil war. But between 1952 (when industrial production was restored to its highest pre-war levels) and 1977, the output of Chinese industry increased at an average annual rate of 11.3 percent, as rapid a pace of industrialization as has ever been achieved by any country during a comparable period in modern world history.' Over the Mao era, the contribution of industry to China's net material product increased from 23 percent to over 50 percent while agriculture's share declined from 58 to 34 percent."

"What makes this so remarkable a phenomenon in the history of postrevolutionary societies is that the call for rebellion against the existing political order came from those who had built that order. It came from some among the veterans of the revolution-and Mao was certainly the most venerable and venerated of the veterans-who had created state and Party institutions they now had come to regard as obstacles to, rather than as instruments of, the revolutionary social changes they sought. But the more important question about the Cultural Revolution is not so much why Mao issued his rebellious call but rather why and how so many tens of millions of ordinary Chinese citizens responded to it."

"In the years immediately preceding the Cultural Revolution, Mao arrived at a conclusion that no other Marxist in power had hitherto been willing to entertain. A socialist society, he now believed, could generate a new class of exploiters; the main barriers to the "transition to socialism" were not the bourgeois residues of the past but rather the bureaucrats of the present, the onetime revolutionaries whom the revolution had transformed into rulers and who by virtue of their political power controlled the new society and appropriated much of the fruits of social labor in the process. On occasion Mao was quite explicit, indeed blunt, in setting forth this view; as when (in 1965) he condemned "the bureaucratic class" as a class "in sharp opposition to the working class and the poor and lower-middle peasants," as those becoming "bourgeois elements sucking the blood of the workers." Nor did he hesitate to identify the site and source of these "new bourgeois elements" or their leaders. They were, he charged on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, "those people in positions of authority-within the Party who take the capitalist road." What seemed at the time to be pure ideological bombast proved to be a remarkably accurate prognosis of the future of Chinese Communist society."

"Mao Zedong's last revolutionary act was to turn into the greatest tragedy of his long revolutionary career-and one with dire consequences for the Chinese people. In 1966 into the seventy-two-year-old Mao staged his final revolutionary drama, stimulating a cataclysmic upheaval that he baptized "the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution." It was his last desperate attempt to revive a revolution that he believed was dying. It was an attempt that failed, and it was a failure on a grand scale, dominating and distorting the social and political life of the People's Republic for more than a decade and tarnishing the historical image of Mao in the process. In launching the Cultural Revolution, Mao proclaimed principles and ideals he could not (or would not) sustain, and unleashed social and political forces he could not control, forces which were to exact a fearsome human and social toll. Before the drama had played itself out, it consumed, physically or spiritually, virtually all of its original promoters and supporters as well as many of its intended victims along with a good number of unintended ones who would have preferred to stand on the sidelines of the battles that racked and nearly wrecked China during the last decade of the Maoist regime."

"Mao Zedong, the main author of the Great Leap, obviously bears the greatest moral and historical responsibility for the human disaster that resulted from the adventure. But this does not make Mao a mass murderer on the order of Hitler and Stalin, as it is now the fashion to portray him. It was not Mao's intention to kill off a portion of the peasantry, as Becker and others imply. There is a vast moral difference between unintended and unforeseen consequences of political actions, however horrible those consequences might be, and deliberate and willful genocide. The blurring of that difference does no service to the task of understanding the terrible moral ambiguities of this most genocidal of all centuries."

"Despite the prominence of the theory of New Democracy in formal Maoist theory for more than a decade, and its seeming promise of a lengthy stage of capitalist (or at least semi-capitalist) development, the bourgeois phase of China's postrevolutionary history was abruptly terminated after a scant four years. No doubt in good measure responsible for the hasty prouncement of the "transition to socialism" was Mao Zedong's longstanding populist-type hostility to all forms of capitalism and his persistent refusal to intellectually accept the Marxist thesis that socialism presupposes capitalism."

"The psychological effects of the Long March are much more intangible. For Mao, at least, the experience served to reinforce his voluntaristic faith that people with the proper will, spirit, and revolutionary consciousness could conquer all material obstacles and mold historical reality in accordance with their ideas and ideals. For those who survived the ordeal-and for those who were inspired by the story of their survival-the experience, however bitter it was at the time, gave rise to a renewed sense of hope and a deepened sense of mission. People must be able to hope before they can act; they must possess not only ideals and a sense of mission, but hope and confidence that they will be able to realize their ideals through their own actions. More than any other event in the history of Chinese Communism, it was the Long March-and the legendary tales to which it gave rise-that provided this essential feeling of hope, the confidence that determined people could prevail under even the most desperate conditions. And more than any other individual, it was Mao Zedong who radiated and inspired this faith in the future. It was a faith not only in those deemed capable of molding the future in accordance with Communist hopes but also in the values regarded as essential to the eventual realization of those hopes. The familiar Maoist virtues of unending struggle, heroic sacrifice, self-denial, diligence, courage, and unselfishness were values espoused not by Mao alone but carried and conveyed by all of the veterans of the Long March, for these were the values they had come to regard as essential to their own survival and to the survival of the revolution to which they had devoted their lives. These ascetic values lay at the core of what later came to be celebrated as "the Yan'an spirit.""