The Art of Strategy

When I began teaching at the Armed Forces Engineering Institute of the People’s Liberation Army of China in 2001, one of my subjects was The Art of War, a military treatise written by Sun Tzu (545-470 B.C.), a famous militarist and strategist in Chinese history.

Since 2003, foreign officers from Asian and African countries began coming to the institute every year to study Chinese military enterprise and culture, and I taught them The Art of War, a favorite course with foreign military officers. In 2016, a team under a senior professor began to offer this course at Peking University. It is very popular with the students there as well, including foreign students.

This little preamble is to show how this treatise, regarded