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1 results

  • 1 - A Brief History of Sunzi in China

  • Peter Lorge, Vanderbilt University, Tennessee
  • Book:
    Sun Tzu in the West
    Published online:
    03 November 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2022, pp 18-43

  • Summary

    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.