SOURCE: Bloodworth, Dennis and Ching Ping. “Western Approaches” and “From the Top.” In The Chinese Machiavelli: 3,000 Years of Chinese Statecraft, pp. 306-21. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

In the following excerpt, Bloodworth and Bloodworth compare and contrast Sun-Tzu's philosophy with those of Machiavelli and Clausewitz and contend that the roots of modern Chinese military policy can be found in Sun-Tzu's instructions.

The Italian world of Machiavelli was a distorted miniature of the Chinese world of Han Fei and Sun Tzu—a jigsaw puzzle of warring states that formed a single culture rather than a single realm, within which all foreigners were looked upon as outer barbari. Cesare Borgia strutted across the scene like a treacherous and unprincipled hegemon, “maintaining such relations with kings and princes that they have either to help him graciously or go carefully in doing him harm.” He pacified the unruly Romagna by appointing...