Abstract
U.S. interest in The Art of War (sunzi bingfa, 512 BCE) has risen dramatically since 9/11.1 Both former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Tommy Franks, masterminds of the Iraq campaign, regularly quote Sun Tzu.2 The New York Times notes that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan may also be learning from The Art of War.3
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Notes
Milt T. Bearden, “Perspective/Inside the CIA: Iraqi Insurgents Take a Page from the Afghan ‘Freedom Fighters,’” November 9, 2003, http://query.nytimes.comgstgst/fullpage.html?res=9E00EFDB1339F93AA35752C1A9659C8B63 (accessed March 11, 2008).
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Emerson M. Niou and Peter C. Ordershook, “A Game-theoretic Interpretation of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War,” Journal of Peace Research 31, no. 2 (1994): 161–74.
See Douglas M. Mecready, “Learning from Sun Tzu,” Military Review (May/June 2003): 85–88. The first English translation of The Art of War appeared in 1910. De-shun Lo, ed. Sun tzu bing fa (Taipei: Li-ming Wen Hua, 1991), 21–22.
James Henry, “China’s Military and Sun Tzu: What Every American Should Know,” 2004, http://www.brookesnews.com/04190/china.html (accessed March 11,2008).
Tom Adkins, “Sun Tzu Visits the Middle East,” 2002 http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/928498/posts (accessed March 11, 2008).
See also Chow-hou Wee, Sun Zi Bingfa: Selected Insights and Applications (Singapore: Pearson, 2005).
Harlan Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, ebook, 2005, http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/7259 (accessed March 11, 2008).
In Mark Crispin Miller, The Bush Dyslexicon: Observations on a National Disorder (New York: Norton, 2003).
De-shun, Lo, ed., Sun tzu bing fa (Taipei: Li-ming Wen Hua Publishing House, 1991).
David Campbell, “Cultural Governance and Pictorial Resistance: Reflections on the Imaging of War,” Review of International Studies 29 (2003): 57–73.
Xian Zhong Niu, Sun tzu san lun: cong gu bing fa dao xin zhan lue (Taipei: Mai Tian Publishing House, 1996) 47–49.
Note, for example, the argument about a democratic peace. This school of thought proposes that warfare will cease when all states convert to liberal democracy; see also Erik Gartzke, “The Capitalist Peace,” American Journal of Political Science 51, no. 1 (2007): 166–91.
Joshua Foa Dienstag, “Serving God and Mammon: The Lockean Sympathy in Early American Political Thought,” American Political Science Review 90, no. 3 (1996): 499.
Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). Also, according to Lloyd, western intellectual thought never considered women capable of reason—the necessary criterion for entering into the social contract. Only men could transcend the banal shackles of the Body to soar into the heavenly realm of Reason. Genevieve Lloyd, Man of Reason (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
Uday S. Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 59–86.
See Roxanne L. Doty, Imperial Encounters: The Politics of Representation in North-South Relations (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).
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Noah Feldman, What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 95.
See L. H. M. Ling, Postcolonial International Relations: Conquest and Desire between Asia and the West (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
L. H. M. Ling, “Borderlands: A Postcolonial-Feminist Alternative to Neoliberal Self/Other Relations,” in ed. Susanne Zwingel, Heike Brandt, and Bettina Brass, Mehrheit am Rand? Geschlechterverhaeltnisse, globale Ungleichheit und transnationale Loesungsansaetze, 105–24 (Berlin: VS Verlag, 2008).
Ping-ti Ho, Youguan sunzi laozi de sanpian kaocheng (Three Studies on Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu) (Taipei: Institute of Modern History, Academica Sinica, 2002).
Shan-ch’un Yang, Sun Tzu (Taipei: Zhishufang Publishers, 1999), 227. Translation by the authors.
Tingyang Zhao, “Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept ‘All-under-Heaven’ (Tian-xia),” Social Identities 12, no. 1 (January 2006): 30.
L. H. M. Ling, “Borders of Our Minds: Territories, Boundaries, and Power in the Confucian Tradition,” in States, Nations, and Borders: The Ethics of Making Boundaries, ed. Margaret Moore and Allen Buchanan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
James L. Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar: Qing Guest Ritual and the Macartney Embassy of 1793 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995).
Hwa Yol Jung, “Confucianism and Existentialism: Intersubjectivity as the Way of Man,” Philosophy and the Phenomenological Research 30, no. 2 (December 1969): 193–94.
Wai-Yee Li, “The Idea of Authority in the Shih chi (Records of the Historian),” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54, no. 2 (December 1994): 395, 399, 400.
Hevia, Cherishing Men from Afar, Xu 2003. Xu, Jie Ling (2003) “Chunqiu bangjiao sixiang shulun.” Qiushi xuekan (Seeking Truth) 30(1) January: 106–10.
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Bartley, Caleb M. (2005) “The Art of Terrorism: What Sun Tzu Can Teach Us about International Terrorism.” Comparative Strategy 24: 237–51.
Dongpuo Li, “Sunzi zhanzhengguan xinlun” (A New Approach to Sun Tzu’s View of War), Zhexue baijia 6 (2007): 190–92.
Zhanwu Wei and Zhongxiang Jing, “Lun ‘Sunzi bingfa’ zhong de zhexue tixi yu zheli tedian (On the Philosophical System and Philosophical Distinguishing Characteristics of Sun-tzu’s Art of War),” Journal of Jilin National University, Humanities and Social Science Edition 1 (February 2007): 9–12.
Liou Yang, “Guanzi de guojia guanxi sixiang ganwei” (A Brief Probe into Guanzi’s Inter-State Theory), Guanzi xuekan 4 (2006): 9–11.
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© 2009 Bina D’Costa and Katrina Lee-Koo
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Hwang, CC., Ling, L.H.M. (2009). The ‘Kitsch’ of War. In: D’Costa, B., Lee-Koo, K. (eds) Gender and Global Politics in the Asia-Pacific. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230617742_4
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