ABSTRACT
The body of writing in Western languages on Chinese military history is not large. Very few students of Chinese history and culture have had much interest in things military, while military historians, for their part, have paid little attention to China. Most general surveys of military history follow in the footsteps of J. F. C. Fuller’s fifty-year-old Military History of the Western World in that they are limited explicitly to a “Western world” (usually defined as Europe, the Near East, and European colonies of settlement).1 Even those authors who have attempted to write a more global military history, such as John Keegan with his History of Warfare (1993), have tended to give China short shrift even as they perpetuate longstanding stereotypes of an Asian way of war.2 To be fair, the writers of broad syntheses have inevitably been hemmed in by the lack of a substantial specialist literature in English and other Western languages. And this neglect surely owes something to the fact that from its origin in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, modern Western sinology grew accustomed to scrutinizing a China that was militarily weak and technologically backward, the hapless victim of Western and Japanese imperialists. Stated in the bluntest terms, China appeared to be a perennial loser with little to teach the winners when it came to the military arts.
