ABSTRACT
The curtain had risen on flesh-and-blood princes and the men who were to play Plato and Plotinus, Caesar and Clausewitz, Machiavelli and Metternich and Dr. Henry Kissinger in China's long and violent history. A Chinese might say with the Emperor Fu Hsi, had he not had the tail of a serpent. Mao put the economical principle into practice during his struggle against the Chinese Nationalist Kuomintang under Chiang Kai-shek, when his guerrilla armies, as he ordered, "came from the people, and went back to the people," and it is perpetuated in the vast peasant militia of China today. The logic of "respecting the king and repelling the barbarian" became in time an instinctive reflex that still served the Chinese when Mao had replaced the last royal ruler and the threat beyond the pale of the Middle Kingdom might lie across the Siberian border, or the Yellow Sea, or the Pacific Ocean.
