Lin ( 2001 ). This edition includes not only the original ancient Chinese
text but also a modern Chinese translation and an English translation.
Where necessary we consulted other English translations of theArt
of warby Cleary ( 2000 ), Griffith ( 1971 ), and Giles (Garvin, 2003 ).
The original ancient Chinese text has a total of 6088 characters. The
extent of the text is deceptively small because ancient Chinese texts
tend to be concise and loaded with rich information. As an example,
we randomly selected 77 ancient Chinese characters inChapter 2and
found that the equivalent modern Chinese version has 159 characters
and the equivalent English version has 134 words.
InTable 5.1we list the major topics of each chapter together with
one or two major sentences for illustration and a count of the number
of characters.
The first chapter is an introduction and an overview of the whole
book. It captures the essence of Sunzi’s military philosophy. It empha-
sizes the importance of war for the survival of the state and proposes
five parameters to determine the outcome of a war, which include the
Way (theDao, the moral support of the populace), meteorological and
topographical conditions of military operations, the leadership quality
of the commanders, and the organization of the army. The opening
chapter also defines war as a matter of strategizing rather than direct
fighting and contains the famous saying popularized by Mao, namely,
‘‘attack when they are unprepared and make a move when they least
expect it.’’ It is apparent thatChapter 1reflects the influence of the
ConfucianDaoof benevolence, the DaoistDaoof dialecticism in
the strategies, and the legalistic prescriptions of how to run the
military organization.
The following ten chapters (Chapters 2–11) are concerned with the
objectives and the development and execution of strategies and tactics.
InChapters 2and 3 , ‘‘Waging war’’ and ‘‘Attacking by stratagem,’’
Sunzi proposes two overall strategic objectives, namely speedy and
complete victories, reflecting his humanist perspective of war as
well as the Daoist dialecticism of winning and losing. InChapter 2,
emphasizing the human and economic cost of war, Sunzi proposes that
a speedy victory is preferred to a protracted one because protracted
wars not only cost more resources and lives but also have logistic
and psychological effects on the operation and morale of the troops.
One specific proposal that stands out in this chapter is about how
to replenish the army by ‘‘obtaining military supplies from home
146 Hai-fa Sun, Chao-chuan Chen, and Shi-he Zhang