Three brief comments can be made in relation to these military texts.
The first is that they reflect the period in which they were written, just
as did Machiavelli’s advice to rulers in sixteenth-century Italy. We
should not expect them to be imbued with Confucian values, for they
were written centuries before these had become accepted as the basis
for government. The second point is that pursuit of victory, forcefully
and decisively, does not actually conflict with the Confucian ideal of
social order once the texts are applied not to civil conflict between
warring Chinese states, but between the Middle Kingdom and threat-
ening barbarian enemies. Preservation of social harmony as endorsed
by Heaven always extended beyond China’s frontiers, a moral mission
that justified the means used to achieve it. The third point, of impor-
tance for Southeast Asia, is that the Chinese way of war was much
more consistently applied along China’s northern and northwestern
borders, against powerful nomadic empires, than it was against neigh-
bouring kingdoms in the south and southwest, where the security
threat was usually much less.
The Confucian ideal was taken up and elaborated more system-
atically by Master Kung’s followers. The most important of these,
Meng-zi (Mencius) and Xun-zi, both lived in the later Eastern Zhou
period in the fourth and third centuries BCE, and both grappled with
the problem of the proper use of force in a civilised society. In so doing
they elaborated an important distinction between bingmeaning war in
an aggressive sense, which Confucianists condemned, and zhengrefer-
ring to the use of violence in a punitive sense. The latter presupposed
a moral and social order that had regrettably been violated, whether by
rebels or barbarians, and thus needed to be restored. Punitive expedi-
tions were justified, as much in sorrow as in anger, as necessary for the
restoration of the social harmony that reflected Heaven’s way. Their
purpose should never, therefore, be to gain at the expense of others,
neither for conquest nor booty, but rather to re-establish universal
acceptance of the moral authority of the Son of Heaven. Time and
again throughout Chinese history, China’s use of military force has
The Chinese view of the world