of war transformed, but a whole new field of intellectual study—the art of war—
was created, replacing codes of chivalry.
Also in the Warring States Period, technological advances made walled cites more
vulnerable and led to siege warfare becoming more sophisticated and more viable. 38
Prior to this time, if well stocked with provisions, the defenders of these fortresses
typically could wait out besieging armies with the expectation that their attackers
would eventually tire of waiting and/or run out of food before they did. Battering
rams, catapults, and mobile towers could be put to good effect to capture a fortress.
The discovery of gunpowder led to the development of the world’s earliest
rockets and later to primitive artillery. This discovery did not have the dramatic
impact on the nature of warfare in China the way that the introduction of the
crossbow or even the stirrup did much earlier. 39 Yet, gunpowder and firearms did
have significant impact in certain periods and specific campaigns. For example,
artillery was effectively employed by China’s armed forces during the Ming
dynasty (1368–1644). In fact, the Ming was the first dynasty in China that
‘systematically...produce[d] and deploy[ed] firearms throughout its military’.
The Ming court found that the Portuguese had better weapons than the Chinese
possessed so it obtained sample firearms and sought technological assistance. The
result was improved arquebuses and cannon manufactured in Chinese armour-
ies which the Ming armed forces put to good use. The Emperor Yongle (ruled
1403–25) began placing cannons in forts along the northern frontier to defend
against raids by Central Asian nomads. The use of firearms likely gave the Ming
an edge in dealing with the marauding Mongols and was ‘unquestionably key’ to
the Ming’s military victory in Korea against the Japanese (noted in the previous
section). While the Japanese military had also adopted firearms, their focus was
on arquebuses and, at least in Korea, Japanese forces were without artillery. 40 In
this pre-modern round of campaign warfare of the late sixteenth century, the
Chinese emerged victorious against the Japanese making better use of Western
technology than their adversaries.
Nevertheless, the irony is that the civilization that had pioneered gunpowder
centuries later became the victim of its invention, when modern artillery and
firearms were used against the Chinese by European invaders who had successfully
refined and developed this technology far beyond where the inventors had taken it.
Modern China
In the modern era, China has always seemed to be at a disadvantage technologi-
cally—always needing to counter the superiority of adversaries. In the early
nineteenth century, it was European seafarers with superior maritime power; in
the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, it was the rapidly
modernizing and expansionist Japanese with superior sea and land power; in
the late twentieth century, it was the highly sophisticated arsenals and armies of
the United States and the Soviet Union. But China did incorporate technology
into warfare. Arguably, the first ‘recognizably modern wars’ fought on Chinese
soil were in 1924 between the armies of rival warlords. The two conflicts—the
206 The Evolution of Operational Art