John F Sullivan
Former U.S. Army China Foreign Area Officer currently studying ancient Chinese military & strategic texts and arguing for the need to study and debate them more broadly within our own military PME and academic institutions.
- While Kissinger remains the most famous modern American strategist within the name dropping set in China, amongst serious Chinese strategic thinkers, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and particularly this 1997 book of his, appears to be much more influential in their own writings.
- Liu Huaqing (2001): “Defense development is a gradual accumulation process. We cannot ignore it for a decade or two and then rush to address it when funds are available. Many development projects have long cycles, and if we don’t prioritize key projects, the gap will widen.”
- “Comprehensive national power competition strategy is to compel adversaries not to take military action against oneself while striving to achieve predetermined strategic objectives through non-war means. It uses strength as the material foundation for deterring adversaries. It emphasizes defeating …
- Wang Huning (1994): “Marxism first asserts that a communist society is an objective necessity, not a subjective desire of individuals. The internal driving force of historical development & the contradictory movement of various social relations inevitably lead to realization of a communist society.
- “What if, during combat, the division commander orders to go east, but the political commissar orders to go west?” An explanation of the roles of the operational commander & political commissar within PLA ranks from a 2000 book, "Heart-to-Heart Talks with Leading Cadres" ...
- China has their own equivalents to military strategy academics like Michael Howard and Colin Gray, but because we don't bother translating anything beyond a few niche texts we continue to think everything about Chinese strategy can be gleaned from Sun Tzu, Mao, and Unrestricted Warfare …
- Xi Jinping (2013): "Our country's national interests have greatly expanded and our security and development are more closely linked to the outside world. Any disturbance in the international arena could affect our security, particularly the security of our overseas interests ...
- On the one hand we lament that what CCP leadership thinks is an unknowable black box, yet on the other hand we’ve never even bothered to translate Wang Huning’s magnum opus on the principles of Marxist political thought, a work that heavily influenced Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, & Xi Jinping …
- Xi Jinping doesn’t publicly acknowledges the June 4th Tiananmen crackdown, but in internal speeches to his military leaders he does bring it up as an example where the PLA was severely tested & passed. He usually refers to it as the “political turmoil (政治风波) in spring of 1989
- King Wei of Qi had two governors—one praised to the sky by the king's ministers, the other ceaselessly vilified by the same officials. He dispatches trusted aides to discover the reason. The vilified governor runs an efficient domain, the praised governor runs a decrepit one ...
- Got tired of waiting for somebody (anybody!) to get around to translating Yang Kuan's classic history of the Warring States era, so finally just did it myself. A link to the first three chapters is posted below if anyone is interested.
- Li Ling: “Some foreign military scholars hold Sun Tzu in extremely high esteem … Sometimes, their high praise surprises even us [Chinese] …
- For anyone who might be interested in the Zuozhuan as military history but find it too time consuming, complicated, or expensive (all legitimate complaints), I do have a distillation of the over 600 military actions it documents in a report you can freely access.
