I stand corrected ... unfortunatley Sawyer DOES share this opinion about a big difference. But he says the main difference was Chinese armies focussing on maneuvring, while Europeans just marched to meet to slug it out (p4 of his 100 unorthodox strategies). So he sees a different difference, but is wrong for the same reason.
Hmm, he seems to only be a translator after all.If there WAS any difference in real war / battle, then it seems that Chinese were re-active, and European more pro-active.
That is, if you only compare by using Chinese theory oppposite European practice (the usual way) ... not right I feel and I doubt if Chinese warfare was as reactive as the books want us to believe.BJ
You can take a chance of translating 100 Unorthodox Strategies yourself.
Got this item from an associate. He found it @ Financial Times Business Wire
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Economic implications of unorthodox warfare D.Murali Chennai, July. 23:
King Wu queried his preceptor, advisor, strategist, and confidant, the T’ai Kung: “I want to overthrow the Shang but have three doubts. I am afraid our strength will be inadequate to attack the strong, estrange the close supporters within the court, and disperse their people.
What should I do?”
The reply, as chronicled in ‘Six Secret Teachings’ (Liu-t’ao), was as follows: “In order to attack the strong you must nurture them to make them even stronger and increase them to make them even more extensive.
What is too strong will certainly break, what is too extended must have deficiencies. Attack the strong through their strength. Cause the estrangement of favoured officials by using favourites, disperse the people by means of people.”
On similar lines is a snatch from chapter 36 of the traditionally received Tao Te Ching: “If you want to reduce something, you must certainly stretch it. If you want to weaken something, you must certainly strengthen it. If you want to abolish something, you must certainly make it flourish,”
Although abstract, the embedded techniques are considered highly applicable in the context of Chinese-American power discrepancies, writes Ralph D. Sawyer in ‘The Tao of Deception’ (www.landmarkonthenet.com). “Exactly how this operational premise may be translated into active measures remains enigmatic,” he adds. “However, economic policies that temporarily cause the US (or Taiwan) to apparently flourish even while fiscally impoverishing it and creating massive manufacturing dependency presumably fall into this category.”
Another possibility, according to Sawyer, can be “political gestures such as repeatedly threatening Taiwan and military actions including the selective development and acquisition of newly menacing weapons that compel the US to augment and disperse its military power (much as the PRC – People’s Republic of China – perceives that the US deceptively manipulated the USSR into the arms race that ultimately exhausted it).”
Contemporary military weapons are epitome of complexity, and martial power is increasingly dependent on technology and communications, the author reminds. “In a Pacific conflict the logistical burden would be enormous and unwieldy, the supply lines severely extended and exposed, and power projection invariably spearheaded by increasingly vulnerable carrier groups.”
Frighteningly, there is then ‘great opportunity to exploit the instabilities inherent in such overextension’ and to target installations ‘in both normal and asymmetric fashion, particularly through the employment of unorthodox techniques.’ Such indirect techniques may include “the blinding of down-looking sensors, distorting the GPS signal or eliminating it altogether with attacks by micro-satellites employed as kinetic weapons…”
Sawyer mentions the findings of ‘Unrestricted Warfare’ by Ch’iao Liang and Wang Hsiang-sui, originally published in Chinese by the PLA in 1999. “Destructive measures that target the financial sector, communications, and the core infrastructure components of electricity and transportation are postulated as certain to severely disrupt normal life, causing consternation and undermining any will to fight because Americans are perceived as lacking self-discipline, resilience, and the capacity to endure casualties.” Disturbing picture of the modern implications that ancient precepts may have. ** A fight with no rules “To suffer and learn a lesson, one pays a high price, but a fool can’t learn any other way,” reads a Chinese proverb, with which Matthew Polly begins ‘American Shaolin’ (www.crosswordbookstores.com).
The first lesson is a challenge match that the laowai (old outsider, a polite term for white foreigners) has to fight against Master Wu, a kungfu teacher from Tianjin. The venue is a tourism centre in Henan province. Bao (Polly) Mosi (Matthew) narrates the walk to the performance hall, along with his teacher Monk Deqing, who quotes his favourite martial arts maxim: “I do not fear the 10,000 kicks you have practised once;
I fear the one kick you have practised 10,000 times.”
The fight has no rules, Coach Yan tells Polly. “I want you to beat him to the ground. You hear me? To the ground.”
The combatants approach… stopping about five feet from each other. “Master Wu shifted into a cat stance, his weight largely on his right foot, his left foot resting lightly in front, a strong defensive position…I had sparred extensively since arriving at Shaolin, but this was the first real fight – street clothes, no rules…” No different from the biz world. ** From steel to steal, In ‘China Shakes the World’ (www.orionbooks.co.uk), James Kynge narrates the tale of how ‘a hungry nation’ has risen. The book opens ‘on the flat alluvium beds’ of the Yangtze River, where parts of a steel mill from the heart of Ruhr “had been reconstructed exactly – to the last screw – as they had been in Germany. Altogether 2,50,000 tonnes of equipment had been shipped, along with 40 tonnes of documents that explained the intricacies of the reassembly process.”
From that steel story, the author moves on to a steal-y one. “As Chinese demand drove up the price of scrap metal to record levels, thieves almost everywhere had the same idea,” he narrates. “During the several weeks from mid February 2004… slowly at first but with mounting velocity, manhole covers started to disappear from roads and pavements all over the world…
The first displacements were felt in Taiwan, the island just off China’s southeast coast. The next were in other neighbours, such as Mongolia and Kyrgyzstan… More than 150 covers disappeared during one month in Chicago. Scotland’s ‘great drain robbery’ saw more than a hundred vanish in a few days. In Montreal, Gloucester and Kuala Lumpur, unsuspecting pedestrians stumbled into holes.”
The manhole cover episode suggests that in many different ways the events reshaping China are no longer merely resonating on foreign shores but actually changing the way the world works, notes the author. “It is said that around 200 hundred years ago, Napoleon warned that people should: ‘Let China sleep, for when she wakes, she will shake the world.’”
Shen Wenrong of Shagang, the Chinese plant, explains to Kynge why he had bought the ThyssenKrupp steel plant: “I needed a horse that would run fast and not eat much hay.
When the next crash in world steel prices comes, and it will certainly come in the next few years, a lot of our competitors who have bought expensive new equipment from abroad will go bust or be so weighed down by debt that they will not be able to move. At that time you will see that this purchase was good.”
Kynge quotes from a poem by Shen, carved into granite, in the new steel town in China: “The bull will rush forward without whipping, once in flight it covers a thousand miles.” Instructive. **
Can’t move the snow to India?Wealth and power are shifting to the East, declares Clyde Prestowitz in ‘Three Billion New Capitalists’ (www.basicbooks.com). It is while skiing on Lake Tahoe in California, in the winter of 2003, that the author gets the first glimpse of the powerful forces being unleashed by the new capitalists and how they might interact with the old system and structures.
Chummy, the author’s oldest son, asks him if he would consider coinvesting in a local snow-removal company. Read on… “‘What do mean by snow removal?’ I asked, somewhat surprised because my son is a high-level software developer. ‘Well,’ he explained, ‘the company has contracts to plow the parking lots and access roads of the hotels and vacation condominiums around here whenever it snows, and that happens pretty frequently between November and May.’ ‘But what on earth are you doing,’ I exclaimed, ‘going into something as mundane as snow plowing?’ ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘they can’t move the snow to India.’
It took a minute for that to sink in. It had never occurred to me that my son had anything to fear from India or anywhere else in terms of his career path.” Spine chilling… or heart warming? ***
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http://BookPeek.blogspot.com http://www.hindu.com/thehindu/holnus/001200707231860.htm # # #
