Swiss sinologist Harro von Senger is a tenured professor of sinology at the University of Freiburg in Germany. His areas of expertise include Chinese law and the history of Chinese legal thought and system. He has written extensively on Chinese law and cultural exchanges between China and the West. His books include The Book of Stratagems, which introduces the 36 stratagems used by ancient Chinese in war, politics and civil interactions, Das Tao der Schweiz (The Tao of Switzerland), and The Thirty-Six Stratagems for Business. He has also translated ancient Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu’s The Art of War into German.

A photo presents the front profile of Harro von Senger.

Harro von Senger

Harro von Senger’s Ph.D. dissertation on traditional Chinese sales contracts is the first doctoral dissertation on Chinese law by a Swiss scholar. He studied at Peking University from 1975 to 1977 on an exchange program and after China opened up in 1978, visited the country regularly to witness the changes during the years of reform and opening up. He talks about his observations and understanding of China.

CNS: You have been studying the Thirty-Six Stratagems for many years and have also written several books on it. You mentioned that the Chinese classic represents a universal pattern of behavior, whether in the East or in the West. What wisdom does it embody?

Harro von Senger: Let me answer this with the taijitu, the symbol in Taoist philosophy in which two contrasting elements make a whole or full circle, that is, the yin and yang, one depicted in black and the other in white. You can say that the black half of the symbol represents the “indirect” (qi) and the white half represents the “direct” (zheng), and the two parts together form a unity. It is impossible to solve all problems in life with the “direct” method, and it is also impossible to do so using the “indirect” method. It is necessary to combine “direct” and “indirect,” and analyze problems specifically to see whether the “direct” or “indirect” method is better.

At the same time, we should not think that “direct” and “indirect” are of equal importance just because the black and white parts make up half of the symbol each. I think it is reasonable to use the “direct” approach as much as possible to solve problems, and let the “indirect” complement the “direct” one. For example, in daily life, we should first solve problems through the legal method and then use the “indirect” methods within the limits of the law and ethics. From my experience, most problems can be solved by “direct” methods, and only a few need to be solved by “indirect” methods. The Thirty-Six Stratagems are a collection of “indirect” wisdom, providing people with ways to solve problems in “indirect” areas and making it easier to find a specific method to “win by surprise.”

Some people have a negative view of the stratagems or tactics, but I believe that small things should not be underrated as they sometimes have a huge impact. For example, the novel coronavirus is so small that it is invisible to the human eye, yet it had such a huge impact on the world. Therefore, views belittling the stratagems are arrogant and superficial.

CNS: Why did your research interests move from the Thirty-Six Stratagems to strategy? How do you understand strategy?

Harro von Senger: The Chinese wisdom for dealing with problems is not limited to the “indirect,” but also includes the “direct.” This wisdom of dealing with problems is what I call strategy. Strategy includes the idea of “direct,” such as “the way to rule a country is to enrich the people first,” and also the idea of “indirect,” such as “conceal one’s ability” and “accumulate energy secretly.” Therefore, in order to understand the Chinese methodology of understanding and transforming the world in a comprehensive manner, we need to study strategies, not only stratagems.

Strategy means plans and outlook in the long run. In 1985, I read a report in a Chinese newspaper that China’s leaders planned to build China into a socialist power with its economy close to that of the world’s most developed countries by the middle of the twenty-first century. That would be one hundred years after the founding of the People’s Republic of China. I was so stunned on reading about this long-term planning that I wrote an article in the influential Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung to introduce China’s “centenary goal” to Westerners. (China announced two centenary goals: The first was to build the country into a moderately prosperous society in all aspects by 2021, which was the centenary year of the Communist Party of China. The second is to build a modern socialist country that is prosperous, strong, democratic, culturally advanced and harmonious by 2049, the centenary of the People’s Republic of China.) I subtitled the article “2049” specifically to refer to the 2049 goal, a span much longer than the strategic plans of the West. And this is also part of the wisdom of strategy.

CNS: In your book Das Tao der Schweiz published in 2017, why did you use the wisdom of the classic text of Taoism, Tao Te Ching or the Classic of the Way and Its Power, to describe Switzerland’s governance approach?

Harro von Senger: I first came across Tao Te Ching when I was studying in Taiwan in the early 1970s. Back then, I found it very strange, as its concepts were unheroic and lacked power and fight. It seemed to have little to do with Westerners and was typical of the “Chinese way of thinking.” But when I reread it later, it began to blow my mind.

In the 1990s, I suddenly felt that the Tao Te Ching was the blueprint Switzerland had adopted, and I used almost 100 quotations from it to explain the Swiss way. The ideas of “a small state,” “wuwei” (inexertion or effortless action) and “non-contentiousness” are very much in line with Switzerland’s status as a small country and the principle of neutrality. It can be said that about 2,500 years ago, a Chinese wise man articulated the art of living in today’s Switzerland. After the publication of Das Tao der Schweiz, the Neue Zürcher Zeitung reviewed my book, but it will take time for people to accept Switzerland’s governance approach explained through Chinese philosophy.

CNS: You call yourself one of the few scholars in the West who study and value Marxism. Which Marxist theory impresses you most?

Harro von Senger: I studied Marxism when I was at Peking University from 1975 to 1977 as I hoped to understand its impact on China’s reality. I began to realize that there was a similarity between Marxism and the legal theory I had studied earlier in Switzerland. Legal theory is about regulating the world while Marxism is about transforming the world and both can be called interventional systems.

What impresses me most about Marxism is the theory of major contradictions and its political practice. I think the Communist Party of China has adopted its political approach based on the main contradictions at different stages of China’s historical development. For example, at the beginning of China’s reform and opening up, the main contradiction in society was “the contradiction between the people’s growing material and cultural needs and the backward social production.” The main contradiction now is “the contradiction between the people’s growing need for a better life and unbalanced and insufficient development.” The main contradiction has been transformed, and all policies and guidelines have changed accordingly.

CNS: In your study of China, you pay a lot of attention to Chinese official documents and legal regulations, and emphasize combining the phenomenological approach with the normative approach.

Harro von Senger: I have a juris doctor degree from the University of Zurich and I am an attorney in Switzerland, so I have paid a lot attention to laws and regulations and official documents since the beginning of my academic career. I am used to reading and analyzing the less “poetic” and to many, “boring” expressions in normative materials. I use the normative approach to study Chinese official documents in order to predict the future development of China, because through these documents it is possible to study China’s vision, direction and goals for the future.

Next, of course, one has to look at reality, and it becomes a phenomenological examination, which is an examination of various tangible phenomena to understand how those visions are being put into practice. From my experience, all areas in China are basically developing as envisioned in the official documents.

CNS: You say the Western industry should put themselves in Chinese shoes and empathize when observing and studying China, and abandon the interference of ideology and bias. Otherwise they are bound to misjudge the situation in China.

Harro von Senger: I think the most fundamental problem in the West is the indifference to epistemology. Western politicians, journalists or think tanks think understanding the world is very simple. Just open your eyes, look at the statistics, examine the scene, interview some people, and finally analyze the collected materials with various Western political, economic, philosophical, psychological and historical theories and experiences, and you can come up with the “correct understanding.” But in reality, understanding the world is not that simple.

For example, the war in Afghanistan, which the Western countries fought for nearly 20 years, was a total failure and not because of bad weapons, or unwillingness to spend money or fear of making sacrifices. The most fundamental reason was that they did not understand the situation in Afghanistan and did not see the importance of epistemology.

As another example, the Western media observe China and report on China with bias, falling into Western-centrism, which is a dead-end. It is also because of the epistemological problems, as they subconsciously see the West as the “creator of the contemporary civilization,” take the pride in the West’s technological superiority into the humanities, and believe that the West is the “teacher” of democracy and human rights and very “superior.” This breeds arrogance and prejudice so that the West ignores or is unwilling to recognize China’s technological progress and development.

I would like to propose the “full-consideration methodology,” a kind of epistemology which requires problems to be analyzed and solved from all sides and studied from multiple ideologies. This is because different ideologies do not see all aspects of the problem in the same way, which means that it is better to see the problem from multiple ideologies than from a single one.

Therefore, I am glad that I studied Marxism at Peking University, which broadened my understanding of the world and was akin to full-consideration methodology. By taking this methodology, I was able to know other aspects of Chinese culture in addition to studying Chinese law. And the study of the Thirty-Six Stratagems is one of the rewards for my efforts to know more.

(Interviewed by De Yongjian)