ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 examines how translations of The Art of War have been received in Western military discourse and beyond, and what impact these translations have had on Western strategic culture. The statistics in this chapter are gathered from two self-built corpora composed of more than 490 texts in Western literature dating from 1910–2020. This chapter firstly provides an overview of the general trend of Sun Tzu’s reception in Western military discourse. It then continues to discuss its reception at the individual, institutional and societal levels, trying to map out the stages through which the translated Sun Tzu is received and to reveal the extent to which Chinese strategic culture influences its Western counterpart. It is discovered that translations of The Art of War have been acclaimed, widely circulated and extensively applied in Western strategic culture. The Chinese military classic has undergone an exceptional process of revival and canonization, bringing about an evolution of Western, especially American, strategic thinking, education and the way in which wars are fought.
