Book Reviews 243

Christopher C. Rand, Military Thought in Early China. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2017. pp. viii, 233. $85.00. ISBN 978-1-4384-6517-3.

The military writings of ancient China—Sunzi in particular—are surround- ed by an aura of mystique. Countless are the popular tracts peddling clever stratagems from the hallowed past as nostrums for worldly success. Yet, de- spite their indubitable cultural impact, pre- and early imperial military writings have been fairly neglected by intellectual historians. Parts of Mark Lewis’s Sanctioned Violence systematically explore these texts’ cultural and intellectual ­dimensions.1 Since then, work by Andrew S. Meyer and Albert Galvany has added to the body of scholarship taking military theory serious- ly qua thought. To this short list of specialist publications, one can now add Christopher Rand’s dissertation, completed in 1977 under such luminaries as Benjamin I. Schwartz, Yang Lien-sheng, and Yu Ying-shih, and published by the author after thirty years as “employee of the United States government” involved in things Chinese (vii). Based on the received canon (Sunzi, Wuzi, Liutao, Wei Liaozi, Sima fa, [Huangshi gong] San lüe), excavated manuscripts (in particular Sun Bin bing- fa), and numerous pertinent theoretical and historiographic sections in pre- Qin and Han works, Rand presents a “philosophical history” (4). Rather than detailing the chronological trajectory of military thinking, he opts for a pre- dominantly problem-oriented perspective. He addresses, in turn, responses to the fundamental challenge of how to integrate military practice into civil government (the “wen/wu problem”) (ch. 1); metaphysical conceptions of war- fare, in particular of military command (ch. 2); practical aspects of organiza- tion and intelligence (ch. 3); positions on the morality of warfare (ch. 4); and the transformation of military practice and thinking under the Western Han (ch. 5). Rand identifies three ideal types characterizing normative approaches to the relationship between military and civil leadership: “militarism,” “compart- mentalism,” and “syncretism.” The militarist position, represented by Han Feizi and Shangjun shu, urged rulers to subject their states entirely to the dictates of warfare and agriculture. Compartmentalism, espoused in Laozi, argued that war “must be divided from civil affairs […] so that the ill effects of war are mini- mized and the benefits are maximized” (26). According to the syncretist posi- tion, warfare and civil government were complementary and interpenetrating

1 Mark Edward Lewis, Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990).

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2018 | doi:10.1163/22127453-12341336 244 Book Reviews activities. Rand identifies syncretist attitudes in parts of the Yi Zhoushu and the Mawangdui manuscript retrospectively entitled Huangdi sijing. Metaphysical dimensions of war are palpably expressed in representations of the general as sage with psychical powers grounded in a qi 氣-based onto­ logy. On such an understanding, voiced for instance in Heguan zi, “martial activity […] is constituted by psychically metabolized vital energy in its con- stantly changing forms” (38). According to Rand, “the general, then, is recog- nizing and taking advantage of transition points ( ji 機) in dispositions and cir- cumstantial power” with the goal of “minutely modifying an ongoing process of transformation” (50). But even where the commander’s actions are thought to be imbricated into the metaphysical deep structure of reality, pragmatic as- pects of warfare are never neglected. The Liutao presents a cosmological organizational scheme for the general staff. Among the commander’s seventy-two assistants were to be occult practi- tioners. Yet the staff likewise encompassed appointees with variegated practi- cal skills and tasks—fighters, healers, and intelligence specialists. This points to a “metaphysical-pragmatic interrelationship” (69), a vision of the military which blended beliefs about the underlying structures of reality with goal-ori- ented manipulation of manifest phenomena. Clearly, for the military writers mystical rumination and practical orientation had to go hand in hand to en- able success. In the same vein, “pragmatic legal strictures […] support the metaphysical qualities of the sage general” (74), conceived of along similar lines as the in- scrutable sage ruler in the Han Feizi. Military writers wrapped the mystical core of command into layers of concrete guidance on practical matters like organi- zation, training, law, and intelligence, which Rand lays out in detail, stressing “the use of legalistic means to ensure unit integrity and discipline” as well as “mutual cooperation” (72). Furthermore, manifest phenomena and speculative substructures interpenetrated in the range of activities Rand subsumes under “intelligence measures,” which could equally well comprise the deployment of spies as astrological, meteorological, and musical prognostication (78-91). The destructiveness especially of late Warring States warfare made it a natu- ral issue for ethical debate. Rand outlines aspects of this debate in military writings and through the lens of pre-imperial philosophical works and think- ers. He stresses the moral ambivalence of military texts, which acknowledged that commanders owed both their own and enemy troops a modicum of ethi- cal consideration. At the same time, commanders were goaded into ruthless- ness by the inescapable metaphysical laws of warfare (127). From this perspec- tive, no contradiction arises from the fact that some military treatises—e.g., Sunzi and Wuzi—professed adherence to Confucian values, though not to stop,

Journal of Chinese Military History 7 (2018) 233-245