SOURCE: Bloodworth, Dennis and Ching Ping. “Western Approaches” and “From the Top.” In The Chinese Machiavelli: 3,000 Years of Chinese Statecraft, pp. 306-21. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

[In the following excerpt, Bloodworth and Bloodworth compare and contrast Sun-Tzu's philosophy with those of Machiavelli and Clausewitz and contend that the roots of modern Chinese military policy can be found in Sun-Tzu's instructions.]

The Italian world of Machiavelli was a distorted miniature of the Chinese world of Han Fei and Sun Tzu—a jigsaw puzzle of warring states that formed a single culture rather than a single realm, within which all foreigners were looked upon as outer barbari. Cesare Borgia strutted across the scene like a treacherous and unprincipled hegemon, “maintaining such relations with kings and princes that they have either to help him graciously or go carefully in doing him harm.” He pacified the unruly Romagna by appointing a callous but efficient minister to cow it into obedience, and when his unpopular severities were no longer required, won the people over to himself by having the scapegoat cut in two and the bits left out in the piazza at Cesena for all to see. As ruthless as the First Emperor of Ch'in, he killed off the ruling families of the cities he seized, so that they could not plot against him.

Machiavelli himself was a pragmatist, a “persuader” guided by expediency who believed that it was often kinder to be cruel and the end always justified the means. Not surprisingly, therefore, Legalism fits at least one of his fine Italian hands like a glove. If the prince wants to maintain his rule, he writes, he “must not flinch from vices which are necessary for safeguarding the state,” for virtues may ruin him, while “some of the things that appear to be wicked will bring him security and prosperity.” Rulers must learn to be “great liars and deceivers,” and the prince should not put himself at a disadvantage by honoring his word, but merely appear to keep his promises, to be “guileless and devout … a man of good faith, a man of integrity.”

He should show no misplaced compassion, but while making sure that he incurs neither popular hatred nor popular contempt, remember that “it is far better to be feared than to be loved.” Since men are more prone to evil than good, he should distrust them all and bind them to him with the threat of prompt penalties, punishing and rewarding in a “striking” fashion that will “set everyone talking.” For “the bond of love is one which men break when it is to their advantage to do so, but fear is strengthened by a dread of punishment which is always effective.” The judgment of the prince must be irrevocable, his policies must be carried out meticulously, and his patronage must make ministers feel that they are totally dependent on him, so that they consider only his interests and never their own.

Like Han Fei Tzu, Machiavelli warns his prince against the motives of those who curry favor with his subjects by doing good, and against “gentry who live in idleness on the abundant revenue from their estates, without having anything to do with their cultivation or with other forms of labor essential to life” (in Ch'in they were relieved of their domains and enslaved, it will be recollected). Machiavelli emphasizes that the conduct of all—including princes—must be regulated by the rule of law, for “princes begin to lose their state the moment they begin to break the laws and”—an interpolation of Li here—“disregard the ancient traditions and customs under which men have long lived.” Almost paraphrasing Hsun Tzu, he explains: “Men never do good unless driven by necessity; when they are free to do as they like, confusion and disorder reign everywhere. Therefore it is said that hunger and poverty make men industrious, and laws make them good.”

Machiavelli wanted a strong and ruthless prince capable of uniting all Italy, “a ferocious lion and a sly fox” who would “contrive to be alone in his authority,” and there is no doubt that he would have spoken approvingly of the First Emperor of the Ch'in Dynasty. Would he have agreed that there was “A Case for Murder”? Bloody fratricide had enabled not only the excellent Emperor T'ang T'ai-tsung to ascend the throne of China, but the legendary Romulus to found Rome. “Many perchance will think it a bad precedent that Romulus should first have killed his brother,” Machiavelli remarks, but “it is a sound maxim that reprehensible actions may be justified by their effects, and that when the effect is good, it justifies the action. For it is the man who uses violence to spoil things, not the man who uses it to mend them, that is blameworthy.”

He admires those who are generous on the way up, but mean when they reach the top. He cautions the prince against ambitious warlords, and of “meritorious dogs” he writes: “It is impossible that the suspicion aroused in a prince after the victory of one of his generals should not be increased by any arrogance in manner or speech displayed by the man himself.” The general must either give up his command, therefore, so that the pacified prince will reward him “or at least refrain from harming him”—or else he must attack him. For he cannot escape the “jaws of ingratitude.” Most generals hesitate between the two courses and are lost, says Machiavelli. On his side, the prudent prince strikes first and wipes out all those who may conceivably conspire against him while he is still consolidating his power, so that they cannot destroy him later. (“Kill him now or you will be sorry,” as so many Chinese counselors told their masters. “Only evil can come of it if you spare him.”)

Machiavelli's “Chinese” cross-references are legion. He advocates the study of antiquity, but his admonitions against blindly worshipping the past would have pleased the Legalists: “The whole truth about the ancient times is not grasped, since what redounds to their discredit is often passed over in silence, whereas what is likely to make them appear glorious is pompously recounted in all its details.” Nations are victims of vicious cycles. The heroic founder of a dynasty is followed by degenerate heirs, whose fear of the growing hatred of their subjects goads them into perpetrating increasingly hideous acts of tyranny until they are overthrown by a new savior. This man triumphs precisely because the government is corrupt and the people are disaffected (the soaring dragon needs the wind), but the day will come when his line will suffer the fate of its predecessor.

Familiar streaks of Taoism also color the thinking of the Florentine, so that he describes ruling princes of the Church as possessing states yet not defending them, having subjects yet not governing them. “And as their states are not defended, they are not taken away from them; and their subjects, being without a government, neither can nor hope to overthrow it in favor of another. So these principalities alone are secure and happy.”

All human affairs are fluid, and a prince is often driven by necessità to behave “like a beast as well as a man” in order to maintain his position, turning “as the winds of fortune and the changes in the situation dictate.” His prosperity or ruin depend on how adroitly he adapts himself, and the wisest remain unmoved by their fluctuating destinies: “Dictatorship did not elate me, nor exile depress me,” he quotes the renowned Roman censor Camillus as saying. (“I have no joy when I win, no anxiety when I lose,” as the Taoist Book of Lieh Tzu has it.)

But Machiavelli is also a military philosopher. Arguments must be supported by arms, and in peace a prince must be prepared for hostilities: “The first way to lose your state is to neglect the art of war.” He advocates respecting the king and repelling the barbarian when he cites the case of Germany, where, “though the emperor has no power to enforce his will, the states are united because the enemy without would overrun them if they quarreled among themselves.” With Mencius, Machiavelli implies that a country with no external foe is on the road to ruin: “Discord is usually due to peace, unity to fear.” Appeasement only evokes demands for further concessions (“like smothering fire with wood,” as the Chinese said).

Once launched, a campaign should be short and crushing. (“There has never been a protracted war from which a state benefited,” Sun Tzu declared.) All decisions must be taken promptly, and when the safety of the realm depends upon them, the ruler must not pause to consider whether they are just or unjust, kind or cruel, “praiseworthy or ignominious,” for in such circumstances “no decision the king takes can be shameful.” (“Do what your enemy would be ashamed to do,” Shan Yang urged.)

Like the flexible Chinese, Machiavelli warns commanders against wasting men and time on long sieges or the defense of difficult positions, and counsels them either to bypass walled cities and fortresses or to persuade those within to surrender by promising that “no attack is being made on the common good, but only on a few ambitious citizens.” (“The army does not punish the common people, but only those who mislead them,” observed Hsun Tzu.) Machiavelli recommends a tactical leniency worthy of the Chinese masters of war, and he is a firm advocate of Sun Tzu's principle of “death ground”—the wilier generals of history always obliged their own troops to fight, but never those of the adversary, he points out. They “left open to the enemy a route they might have closed, and closed a route to their own soldiers which they might have left open.”

Did Sun Tzu stress: “All war is based on deception”? Machiavelli declaims: “It is a glorious thing to use fraud in the conduct of war” and “a prince who wishes to do great things must learn to practice deceit,” for while force by itself never suffices, fraud may. When the enemy appears to make a colossal blunder, therefore, distrust him. Like Chuko Liang, Machiavelli knows that armies can be thrown into confusion by “unfamiliar cries” and “strange sights.” The “Sleeping Dragon” frightened off a formidable but wary enemy simply by leaving city gates open and unguarded, and Machiavelli recalls that when the Gauls found the gates of Rome open and unguarded they also “waited a day and a night without entering, for they feared a ruse.”

Hsun Tzu spoke scornfully of mercenaries as “hired laborers”—“for if men do something only for the sake of benefit, they will abandon an undertaking as soon as it appears unprofitable or dangerous.” “Mercenaries and auxiliaries are useless and dangerous,” echoes Machiavelli. “There is no loyalty or inducement to keep them in the field apart from the little they are paid, and this is not enough to make them want to die for you. They are only too ready to serve in your army when you are not at war; but when war comes they either desert or disperse.”

Like most Chinese from Mo Tzu to Mao, he emphasizes that the soldiers themselves are the sinews of war. “It was not that the walls were low … but that the men abandoned the city,” Mencius said nearly two thousand years before him. “Good armies without fortresses are adequate defense,” writes Machiavelli, “but fortresses without good armies are no defense at all.” The prince, therefore, must “arm himself with his own subjects,” for without faithful, disciplined, and efficient troops, gold and terrain and allies are of no avail. In his Art of War he argues that security lies in a trained militia inspired by loyalty to prince or republic, and talks of artillery as the gadgetry of mercenaries much as Mao talks of the megaton bomb as the gadgetry of imperialist “paper tigers.”

Clausewitz, born into an age in which the great levies of Napoleon were to sweep across Europe, fired by the sense of purpose and patriotism that the Little Corporal and the ideals of the French Revolution had put into their veins, was also a passionate champion of the citizen army and the “people's war,” and it is not difficult to find points of contact between the author of Vom Kriege (On War) and Chinese strategists ancient and modern.

“Men proficient in battle do not easily grow angry or lightly instigate war,” said Lao Tzu, and in his great military classic Clausewitz writes: “War is not a pastime, no mere passion for venturing and winning. It is a serious means for a serious object.” It must not be undertaken recklessly, and reason must always prevail over courage. The country must be fully prepared for hostilities, which should be conducted with dispatch: “No conquest can be finished too soon.” Speed and surprise, secrecy and good information about the enemy are of paramount importance. Commanders must be mathematically minded, and think only in terms of expediency. They should not fight against a superior army or be drawn into battle on the enemy's terms, but avoid fortresses and attack weakness, concentrating their troops so that they can outnumber their opponent “at the decisive point.”

Clausewitz defines war as an instrument of politics (Mao: “War is a political action”). Power is the ability to destroy the adversary, but the army must be subordinate to the state (Mao: “Power grows out of the barrel of a gun,” but “the Party must command the gun”). The object is “complete victory,” since “moderation in war is an absurdity” (Mao: “If the Kuomintang fight, we will wipe them out completely; wipe out some, some satisfaction; wipe out more, more satisfaction; wipe out the whole lot, complete satisfaction.”¹). So far, so Chinese.

Appearances are deceptive, however. Vom Kriege presents the brutal antithesis of most Chinese military thinking, and in reality the cold, professional ruthlessness of its German author has almost nothing in common with the cold, professional ruthlessness of Sun Tzu or Mao—or Machiavelli. For Mao the end was the “liberation” of China, and armed struggle was the means. For the rest: “War, this monster of mutual slaughter,” must be abolished, he insisted.² Unfortunately, “war can only be abolished through war, and in order to get rid of the gun it is necessary to take up the gun,” he continued, but “the only ones who crave war and no peace are certain monopoly capitalists in a handful of imperialist countries which depend on aggression for their profits.”

Clausewitz would have regarded this as mindless blasphemy, for he had the highest possible regard for war. There could be nothing monstrous or unnatural about “mutual slaughter,” since the interests of nations inevitably clashed, and conflict was therefore a normal condition among them. Its ideal form was “absolute war,” in which the material hindrances and human annoyances he called “friction” were removed, and all combat built up into one great, glorious, final battle, just as the sun's rays are focused by a magnifying glass “in a perfect image, in the fullness of their heat.”

Almost as if he were directly refuting the subtle strategies of Sun Tzu, he remarks disdainfully in his writings: “Philanthropists may easily imagine there is a skillful method of disarming and overcoming an enemy without causing great bloodshed, and that this is the proper tendency of the art of war.” Some had already put about the unhealthy and erroneous idea that “only those generals were to deserve laurels who knew how to carry on war without spilling blood,” he complains. Sun Tzu may have laid down that “to subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill,” but Clausewitz retorts: “The acme of strategic ability is displayed in the provision of means for the Great Battle” in which alone “the overthrow of the enemy is to be achieved.” Painless shortcuts to victory like breaking up the enemy's alliances are not valid substitutes.

All war is based on deception, Sun Tzu taught. “War is an act of violence to compel our opponent to do our will,” Clausewitz announces uncompromisingly, and he goes on to assert that tricks and ruses and false plans and reports have usually had little effect on the outcome of a battle: “A correct and penetrating eye is a more necessary and useful quality for a general than craftiness.” Stratagem may “offer itself as a last resort” to the “weak and small,” but it is “he who uses force unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved” who carries the day.

Clausewitz does not hesitate to put the enemy in “death ground”: “The danger of having no line of retreat paralyzes movements and the power of resistance,” he claims. Nor does he warn commanders against chasing a seemingly beaten enemy with limited forces in hazardous circumstances: “When the conqueror can continue the pursuit throughout the night, if only with a strong advance guard … the effect of the victory is immensely increased.”

It is easy enough to discover where Machiavelli also parts company with the Chinese. Unlike Mencius, he thinks the state should be enriched for the public good, while the citizens are kept poor, and unlike all Confucians (but in agreement with the Maoists), he puts his faith in extremes rather than the “Golden Mean.” But—cupboard humanist or not—he also differs on a dozen questions with Han Fei Tzu, for he argues for clemency against cruelty, republic against principality, man against matter, and he does not treat the people as expendable straw dogs whose nonexistent souls may be manipulated by the next Legalist Pavlov in line.

It is nonetheless the shadow of Clausewitz, not Machiavelli, that darkens the minds of the military strategists of the West and divides them from the minds of the East. It was his grim figuring that could still be discerned behind the meat grinding in Flanders, the disastrous “Great Battle” at Dienbienphu, and the American steamrolling in Vietnam—where Sun Tzu and Mao could be sensed behind the elusive guerrilla strategy of the Vietnamese Communists. Clausewitz may believe a state must reconquer territory it has lost to an adversary, just as Mao believes a people must “liberate” territory they have “lost” to the class enemy. But there the parallel ends. For the rest, when they appear to speak in unison of “citizen armies” or “people's wars” or “mutual slaughter” as instruments of politics, Clausewitz is always talking in terms of attack, Mao in terms of defense.

.....

When the Chinese hurled wave upon wave of close-packed infantry against the withering fire of the Americans in one roaring human sea during the conflict in Korea, they seemed to have thrown their own parsimonious principles to the dogs of war, and to be “using force unsparingly, without reference to the bloodshed involved,” as Clausewitz had advised. But Sun Tzu had said, “When you outnumber the enemy five to one, you may attack,” and to attack in Korea was to defend China herself, for the two countries were “as the lips to the teeth; when the lips are gone the teeth are cold.”

Taking it from the top again, the lengthy opus of Chinese history has this one recurring theme, to which foreign forays and “punitive” expeditions abroad have been mere counterpoint. The first instinct of the Chinese is to deploy forces to “repel the barbarian,” and to this end they can normally be expected to conform to their long traditions. They will prepare for war when there is still peace, and while refraining from all rash acts, will avoid “smothering fire with wood” by giving in to their adversaries—unless they are compelled to appease now in order to punish later. As far as possible, they will skirt strength and strike weakness, seize no territory they cannot hold, fight by “attacking the enemy's strategy,” and so forestall a major armed conflict.

“Repelling the barbarian” does not simply mean sitting on the Chinese border, or even rushing military aid to friendly neighbors threatened with aggression, however. It means refusing to withdraw “historical” claims that the Russians are illegally occupying 600,000 square miles of Chinese soil, publishing an official map that includes within the frontiers of the People's Republic almost the whole of the South China Sea down to offshore Borneo, sinking an intrusive South Vietnamese gunboat off the “Chinese” Paracel Islands (and so, incidentally, warning off the Seventh Fleet—a case of “killing the chicken to scare the monkey”). And if the Russians threw their armor across the northern border in a surgical blitzkrieg whose object was to amputate Manchuria, it could mean a Chinese counterthrust toward the exposed Soviet nerve-centers of Vladivostok and Khabarovsk.

Every time the Chinese have exploded a nuclear device, they have nevertheless assured the world that it has been “entirely for the purpose of defense,” for “ultimately abolishing nuclear weapons,” which “at no time and in no circumstances” would China be the first to use. The offensive task of preventing war by “attacking the enemy's strategy,” disrupting his alliances, and sapping his will to fight may primarily be confided to the instruments of Chinese diplomacy and Communist subversion. If in a nuclear age China's ultimate deterrent must also be nuclear, it should still be regarded as no more than a deterrent.

Antique counsel not to hit out at the masses, not to make more enemies than friends, still applies today when the object of the Chinese is to undermine a Soviet regime dominated by a “revisionist renegade clique,” not to annihilate the multitudinous Russians in a series of super-Hiroshimas. “The army does not punish the common people, but only those who mislead them.” It pays better to go for the hearts and minds of the millions than for their throats.

Furthermore, Sun Tzu and Mao have taught the Chinese to avoid battle with a superior enemy, and China cannot hope to match the two superpowers in the radioactive field. If the Chinese fight, they want to “shape” the adversary to their requirements, to fight “downhill,” not with a slender stock of nuclear warheads but with their almost inexhaustible supply of ordinary mortals.

And even that flood of men must be seen above all as a deterrent. Peking wishes to dissuade the Americans and the Russians from contemplating any kind of military mischief against China by arguing that the logical consequences of swapping dead with 800,000,000 Chinese would be lamentable. If this consideration does not discourage the enemy, the Chinese will be geared to fight a “people's war” against him with a three-million-strong regular army backed by a huge militia, and prove the accuracy of their arithmetic.

Their intransigence in all border talks with the Russians during the mid-seventies, like the stream of provocative abuse they poured out upon Moscow, showed that political leaders in Peking were not as afraid of the Soviet challenge on the ground as their almost hysterical propaganda suggested. At the same time their very inferiority dissuaded them from dropping their voices and sitting down quietly with the superpowers to negotiate nuclear differences. For a lord does not go abroad unescorted, even to conclude a treaty of peace, and wherever possible the Chinese only play from strength—whether they are striking bargains or smiting barbarians.

Yet it was their nuclear deterrent that gave them confidence. For their missile delivery systems might be sketchy, but they were widely dispersed, and if the Russians wanted to mount a pre-emptive strike big enough to knock out all the installations in China—silos and airfields and stockpiles and atomic plants—they would have to expend so much of their own hitting power that they would face their American rivals suddenly and seriously weakened themselves (and vice versa).

Neither Washington nor Moscow knew, moreover, at just what point the Chinese would feel compelled to press the button and send their own rockets smashing into preselected enemy targets if they were attacked—and so tip the scales further against the aggressor, leaving the leaders of the “third kingdom” with the game in their hands. Peking therefore had enough atomic leverage to persuade each of the giants that it would only be sacrificing the indispensable weight it needed to counterbalance the other if it tried to neutralize the People's Republic.

While thus using barbarians to pacify barbarians, China officially welcomed proposals before the United Nations for nuclear-free zones in Latin America, the Middle East, and South Asia, but opposed any move to ban atomic tests and so keep the membership of the nuclear club exclusive. All attempts to stop other nations from making their own multiple-megaton warheads, the Chinese protested vigorously, were merely designed to leave a vulnerable world at the mercy of bullying superpowers already armed to the teeth with them. Russia and America were bent on using their formidable nuclear armament to “act the overlord,” and China called for nothing short of the total prohibition and destruction of all atomic weapons.

This nuclear policy fitted harmoniously into the already familiar score, for it served to play America off against Russia and simultaneously helped to alienate both from the angry young states of the Third World, among which Peking was sedulously fostering a new nationalism of the have-nots. By 1970 the Chinese had overtaken the Soviet Union to become the most generous philanthropists in the Communist camp, and were giving backward countries three times as much aid as their Russian rivals. China was by now the self-appointed champion of the underdog nations, which were the victims of shameless “blood-soaked exploitation and plunder” by the imperialists—despite the fact that by withholding their raw riches in oil, rubber, and non-ferrous metals they could bring the affluent West to its knees.

In their campaign to isolate the U.S.S.R., the Chinese not only opened a diplomatic offensive to win friends and influence people's republics in Eastern Europe, but at the other extreme courted all four members of CENTO, the anti-Communist Central Treaty Organization which included Britain, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan and was sponsored by Washington. Nor—to recapitulate—did they neglect the still-transparent two-dimensional “Europe” that might one day materialize as the “distant” super-ally in Russia's rear that their forebears had sought for centuries.

But above all they pursued a policy of disconcerting one government by flirting with another, playing hard-to-get here and come-hither there. For the Chinese had known for 2,500 years that in power politics the most important thing was not to be committed, but to stay aloof—not to be caught on one side, but to be courted by all.

Most of China's careful smiles were directed at Washington. The Chinese wanted the Americans to keep a foothold in the Far East and were ready to welcome their continued presence in South Korea and Japan and even Taiwan (if in modest numbers and for a short season only). Their military umbrella would remove any justification for the expansion of the Japanese armed forces to be converted into an explosion, and they would act as a counterpoise to creeping Soviet influence in Tokyo and elsewhere in the region. If thereafter a closer Sino-Japanese understanding cut the Russians out of the running, the Americans would also “go home,” for as Tokyo and Peking drew together, the security treaty between Japan and the United States would degenerate from a valid defense pact into an invalid and indefensible anachronism. Meanwhile, the vestigial affaire between America and Taiwan prevented the Russians from pushing their way into Taipei, although they had been flirting with the Chinese Nationalists for more than ten years, it was said in Peking.

But Premier Chou En-lai, quoting Lenin at the Tenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in 1973, warned his audience to distinguish between those who helped outlaws in order to share in the loot and those who bowed to the exigencies of the moment by compromising with them “in order to lessen the damage the bandits may do and to make it easier to capture and execute them in the future.”

The message was loud and clear. China was not going to turn away irrevocably from the United States, and so sacrifice the “big advantage” of an American counterbalance to the Soviet Union for the sake of “small gains.” On the contrary, she would tolerate Washington's importunities on the Chinese periphery for as long as necessary, “swallowing the teeth and the blood,” biding her time—and giving no key positions away. If any American “bandit” read more than that into the smile of the Chinese Prime Minister, he was simply the victim of his own naïveté.

Some might accuse the Chinese of misleading them by saying one thing and doing another—treating American imperialist fiddling in the affairs of the Third World to indigestible heaps of hostile Communist syntax, yet giving Dr. Kissinger a warm welcome in Peking. But “all war is based on deception.” The Chinese themselves never confused appearance with reality, or their hot-gospeling with the cold facts. “Friendly foreigners” might arrive in Hong Kong from a conducted tour of China, brimming over with flattering impressions vastly at variance with the tales of refugees (who did not openly return to capitalist bondage by train, but secretly swam to liberty across intervening waters well stocked with sharks). The truth usually lay down the middle. But the foreigners had been left free to delude themselves, and the greatest delusion of all was to imagine that somehow Peking had gone soft on international socialism.

In the mid-seventies visitors to China were shown not only how magnificently she was developing, but from what depths of poverty she had still to rise. It would take her half a century to catch up with the West—the West of October 1, 1974—said one senior cadre. “Feign inferiority,” Sun Tzu had advised, and it did not all have to be feigned. True to their traditions, the Chinese had set out to win allies and sympathizers on the way up as fellow victims of a rapacious Soviet-American hegemony, and since they would be able to “forget the good that men had done” them once they were on top, they were extending a friendly hand to all and sundry abroad, including reactionary premiers and right-wing military juntas.

This “vertical policy” tempted some analysts to insult the Communist leaders in Peking by inferring that they had abandoned the cause of revolution. But to assume that the Chinese had renounced their socialist mission in favor of the tactical friendships they now fostered with kings and capitalists against the Kosygins of the world was to mistake the lap for the race.

They were exploiting the “contradictions” between the submerged continents and the superpowers, the have-nots and the haves, and provoking a conflict that looked remarkably like the first phase in some global version of the two-stage Russian Revolution. It was as if a hundred bourgeois political personalities from Manila to Mexico were being groomed to play the interim role of a composite Kerensky opposite the tsars of Moscow and Washington, bringing more “social justice” into international relations before they in their turn were overthrown by the proletarian forces within their own states.

“Just wars” would still be supported, but China's policy was founded on the flexibility demanded by a constantly changing political cosmos, and the problems of the capitalist world were themselves evolving and multiplying in a manner that might one day make it possible to demonstrate Sun Tzu's “acme of skill” and “subdue the enemy without fighting.” And from that could come the new Ta T'ung—unity and peace in a Communist universe purged of dissent, of which China would once again be the spiritual center.

Machiavelli, who believed that necessità was the mother of decision, that blind fortune was the counterpoise to human virtù, told Lorenzo de' Medici that the success men enjoyed depended only on “the extent to which their methods are or are not suited to the nature of the times.” The Chinese, pursuing an erratic course of their own in conformity with the flow of history, would not quarrel with this proposition. If their ultimate goal seems ludicrously distant, so was the prospect of creating a Communist Chinese superpower when Mao Tsetung took to the hills like a beaten bandit with a few hundred followers in 1927—and evolved his theories on “protracted war.” Their ambitions may appear no more than idle dreams today. But it is the dreams of today that become the realities of tomorrow.

Notes

1. “On the Chungking Negotiations,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. IV.

2. “Problems of War and Strategy,” Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung, Vol. II.

References to Machiavelli and Clausewitz and quotations from their works have been taken (with few exceptions) from the following:

Machiavelli: The Discourses, edited by Bernard Crick (translation of Father Leslie J. Walker), including notes on The Art of War, Penguin Classics, 1970.

Machiavelli: The Prince, translated by George Bull, Penguin Classics, 1972.

Clausewitz: On War, edited by Anatol Rapoport (translation of Colonel J. J. Graham of 1908), Penguin Classics, 1968.