Rand Christopher C. Military thought in early China

New York: State University of New York Press, 2017. — viii, 233 p. — ISBN: 9781438465180 (eBook).The present study partakes of this impetus, and also adopts the view—now widely held among specialists—that military thought in early China, like other intellectual strands of that era, should not be described as the output of a discrete school of military philosophers (bingjia 兵家). The development of philosophy in the pre-Han and Western Han periods occurred not in separate compartments or lineages but in an interactive way, producing new amalgams and hybrids of ideas as the sociopolitical problems to which they were applied changed. One has only to note the Legalist predilections of Xunzi 荀子 (fl. third century BCE), a Ruist (Confucian), or the development of Yin-Yang 陰陽 theory by Dong Zhongshu 董仲舒 (ca. 179–ca. 104 BCE), also a Ruist, to see this common willingness by philosophical exponents to borrow from different intellectual streams of thought when the objective conditions demanded a new permutation of ideas. This is not to say that one should dismiss the importance of clusters of Chinese thinkers who held similar opinions on current issues; indeed, it will be necessary to refer to such groups in the course of this study.