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Dragon’s Mind: The Chinese
Strategic View continues....
GEOPOLITICS AND THE CHINESE MILITARY CLASSICS
3 German thinkers who studied Mackinder’s ‘Heartland Theory’,
published in 1904, came up with the pseudo-science of geopolitics.
Mackinder propounded the theory that whichever power ruled the
Eurasian ‘heartland’, i.e., eastern Europe and central Asia, would
become the predominant power in the world.
The Germans interpreted political geography as an instrument of militarist expansion. Their geopolitical projections envisaged great continental aggregations of power, each aiming at self-sufficiency, and were thus more or less a
prescription for the creation of the Soviet Union. A very much older
culture, that of the Han Chinese, had through experience and the study
of their history already written down the possible methods of consolidation of territory and military power, and discussed them at length in their classical works.
THE CHINESE MILITARY CLASSICS
The Warring States period is known for the flowering of the ‘The
Hundred Schools of Thought’, which saw the composition of many
literary and historiographical works. Among these were the earlier of
the ‘eight military classics’, written between 500 BCE and 700 CE,
which form the basis of Chinese military strategic thought today.
China’s diplomatic stance since the early 1950’s, and all its subsequent
actions, including those of the brief 1962 Sino-Indian border war, have
all been in accordance with the teachings of the ancient Chinese masters
of strategy, and were thus, in essence, predictable. The eight military
classics guide Chinese military strategic thought even today.
These, in roughly chronological order, are:
Initial Period:
The Methods of the Ssu-Ma (Ssu-ma Fa)
Sun-tzu’s Art of War (Sun Tzu Bing Fa)
Sun Bin’s Military Methods (Sun Bin Bing Fa)
Second Period:
Wu-tzu
Third Period:
Wei Liao-tzu
Tai Kung’s Six Secret Teachings
Three Strategies of Huan Shih-kung
Fourth Period:
Questions and Replies Between T'ang T'ai-tsung and Li Wei-kung
To be continued......