ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the context that influences and constrains the translation and reception of The Art of War in Western discourse. Aided by Corpus 2, the analysis is conducted at the situational, institutional and social-cultural level. The study reveals that the translation and reception of Sun Tzu in the West are greatly influenced by the following factors: the immediate situational factors (such as the translator’s identity and the target readership), the military demand for strategic innovation, the relative degree of power inequality and intense power competition between the capitalist countries and communist countries mainly caused by the ideological disparity between capitalism and communism. Although many strategists have attempted to learn from Sun Tzu, the reception of The Art of War by those in the Western military has been plagued with cultural bias and stereotype, such as the Cold War Mentality and China Threat Theory. Particularly, Sun Tzu’s reception has been unfortunately crippled by the over-reliance on the Clausewitzian strategic tradition, with its prioritization of advanced killing military technology and lethal operations and preference for tactics over strategy. Such tendency has resulted in the neglect of Sun Tzu’s peace-prioritized principle of victory without fighting and the failure of many US-led military operations, including the Afghanistan War.
