Which Wars Are Most Important?

Mongols!!!

Re: Anon's comment–

I discussed this issue a little in my original series on the Chinese stratic tradition. You can divide any "tradition" into two parts–strategic theory and strategic practice. Most of the time when I talk about "the Chinese strategic tradition" I am talking about the first of these–that is, the theories of folks like Sunzi and Mao Zedong about how to win wars, increase a country's wealth or strength, and create a favorable world order. Those who seek "a Chinese way of war" are more concerned with practice–that is, how have Chinese armies actually fought their wars over their history.

I wrote that series to show where more research needed to be done. China has had thousands of wars over its history, and almost none have anything written about them. How do you prioritize what to write? My suggestion was to work first on those wars that Chinese strategic theorists throughout the centuries were most likely to cite and discuss. I did not include Western or other international wars because plenty of research has been done on them already.

For today's purposes–what conflicts are most important to discussions of war and politics in contemporary China–it would be appropriate to add the Western conflicts Chinese read and think about to the list of Chinese ones listed above. Off the cuff I suggest the following:

*The Napoleonic Wars
*WWI
*WWII
*The Gulf War

The Napoleonic Wars make their way into the discussion mostly through Clausewitz, whom the Chinese have read and paid attention to since Mao. It is impossible to separate contemporary IR theory from WWI case studies, and as Chinese academics pay attention to international IR theory, this gets quite a bit of attention too. WWII and the Gulf War get in on their own merits. (COIN isn't a big topic in Chinese circles, so the many insurgencies on the U.S. list don't show up).

Perhaps Britain's naval campaigns in the 18th century might make the cut as well. There has been a big hullabaloo over the last 15 years in China about how all great powers were great sea powers, Chinese translations of Alfred Thayer Mahan, the whole nine yards. Britain & the USA are always the central case studies in this discussion.

I would think of the lists like this: You walk into a book shop and open ten new books, all written in 2015, each by some American strategic theorist or defense analyst of renown. What wars would they use and reference? I'd suggest the vast majority of references–especially the short asides where knowledge is assumed, not explained in detail–would come from this list. America wasn't around in 432 BC, but every American strategist worth his salt has read Thucydides cover to cover. He's part of the tradition.

Any war from any place or time could feasibly make its way onto any of these lists. If every War College in America required its students to read a few books about the Taiping Rebellion, then the Taiping Rebellion would make the list. I'm not holding my breath though. The simple fact is that most people across the world are most comfortable and most interested in the history of their own people or civilization, however they define it. I don't think it is wise to do things this way, and I think in the end the advantage will go to people like the Indians or the Chinese who are both familiar with their own history and strategic theory, and those of other countries once more strong and powerful than they. (One place where synthesis is especially likely is Japan, whose own historical tradition is very much in debt to Chinese texts and who have written much in modern times about Chinese history, but who also have been plugged into Western academic circles and political systems to have a lot of that bleed over.)

It is obvious to say which war is the most important [to the world]. Just look at the two factors: the scale of the war and the immediate impact/results. WWI and WWII would be the top ones.

I propose a new idea. Which smaller war is the most important [to the world]? I would propose the answer: The First Indochina War, 1946-1954. This small war in the global scale resulted in the start of the collapse for the entire colonial system. It's the first time a small backward Asian colonial country defeated a much more powerful and bigger colonial master. And it inspired other colonies to revolt.

I always love the idea of the weaks prevail over the strongs. When I was a kid, I was born very poor, into a hell hole. My lineage was light-skinned Asian, but where I was born, there were a lot of dark-skinned Asians. Being poor, small and malnourished among the much bigger, stronger dark-skinned Asian kids, I was subjected to a lot of abuses.

By age 13, I decided to fight back and then prevailed over my attackers. At age 15, in my first mass battle, my group had 10 small light-skinned kids. We were trapped by 20 much bigger dark-skinned kids and yet, I prevailed with a decisive victory. The force discrepancy was 6 to 1 (20 kids x size-3 vs 10 kids x size-1).

-Drgunzet-

Where do Chinese in military/political circles get their knowledge of military history? I would imagine that the number who spend a lot of time reading classical Chinese and thousand-page studies for specialists is small. Are there a group of popularizers who boil down and gloss academic research, and how do they relate to the people who do original research and link it to things which academics are interested in? I am trying to imagine the Chinese equivalent of Victor Davis Hanson or Pen and Sword Books.

I would have thought that Jill Lepore's "The Name of War" would get some traction, but its postmodernist and its not an operational study.

@BooksandSword–

I've found that the average Chinese is much more familiar with their history–or at least a version of it–than Americans are. Perhaps this is because it is the subject of so many poems, novels, and television dramas. It is also a big part of the language. (Think phrases like "Crossing the Runicon" but times their quantity by 10).

There are of course popular historians like Victor Davis Hanson and Adrian Goldsworthy. Apparently it is much easier to make a living selling history books in China–or so I have been told by a Western historian whose managed to penetrate the market there.

And of course all the classics written in literary Chinese have been translated in modern Chinese and can be found in normal book shops.

Drugnzent–

That is inaccurate. "People vs people" really only came into its own during the French Revolutionary Wars. For most of the late Medieval and Early Modern period state leaders floated above their subjects, peasants not really caring who ruled over them if it meant lower taxes or an end to war's destruction. That most European states were then multi-ethnic empires not held together by common language or culture surely contributed to this. (I'd give you references on this, but this is solid historical orthodoxy. You'l find it in any history of European warfare).

Likewise, during the time of the Roman Empire or the post Alexander successor states, the most important fights were always between those speaking the same language and claiming the same culture.

Ancient China, for its part, was less ethnically united that it seems — the Chu and the Qin were not considered Hua (the term back in the day for ethnic Han), and the writers of the era were sharply aware of different "national" characteristics of the people living in each state. And then they had different characters, weights and measures, and probably distinct spoken languages. Had the Qin (and then the Han) not united China I doubt very much that subsequent Chinese would consider themselves one ethnicity. Chinese sometimes call the warring states a "civil war." It only looks like one in hindsight.

Mark Edward Lewis has a good ten or so pages on this in The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (History of Imperial China).

And of course, Eveything south of the Yangtze was once solidly in the "not ethnic Han" group. War played just as important a part as migration in bringing ethnic unity to the south.