Customer Reviews

Chinese Military Theory: Ancient and Modern

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There is no doubt that this is a difficult subject. The author makes several qualifications and eliminations from his analysis on the grounds that: there are too many works to be analysed, they are in private hands and unavailable, they are reinterpretations of older works or no longer significant in the author's opinion. Accordingly the ancient section in the book on which I was most interested was covered in a terse chapter. There are some good points in that material but they are obscured by limited space for elaboration and lack of practical examples in a historical context. The bulk of the book deals with China's military history during the Opium War and the 20th century, with long relatively uninteresting sections on Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong's Military Thought. Unless you are interested in 20th century Chinese military development which is adequately covered in other books I cannot recommend this work as an overview on Chinese Military Theory.