Thomas Cleary - Ways of Warriors, Codes of Kings: Lessons in Leadership from the Chinese Classics

For more than two thousand years, ever since Greece and Rome began importing silk from China, there has been a stream of transmission in arts and sciences East to West. Sometimes sinking underground in deserts of political isolation and warfare, sometimes springing to life in oases of new hybrid civilizations, over the centuries this stream of knowledge produced many technical innovations in material culturein medicine, metallurgy, ceramics, papermaking, textiles, agriculture, pyrotechnics, printing, transport, mathematics, astronomy.

Many seminal forms of social and political science are also found in the works of the ancientstheocracy, bureaucracy, hierarchy, monarchy, plutarchy, oligarchy, feudalism, imperialism, militarism, despotism, fascism, legalism, anarchism, socialism, paternalism, individualism, conformismthese conceptions and more were all articulated by Chinese political philosophers of olden times. Even revolutionary and democratic ideas are to be found in Chinese lore of more than two thousand years ago, as are more subtle spiritual conceptions of state, society, and individuality.

Ideas tend to travel with trade, as with diplomacy and warfare, often taking on new forms as they are transformed by new environments and applied to new situations, expressed in different languages, and adapted by diverse peoples. It is not always possible to track cultural drift, especially in the shifting sands of global events, but it is clear that for all the variety of world civilizations, we share intersecting histories and have common interests.

Among the spheres of Chinese culture that have attracted the attention of other peoples near and far, past and present, the sciences of statecraft and warfare have been particularly prominent. Many of the Asian nations, incuding Korea, Japan, Tibet, Vietnam, and various Mongolian, Turkic, and Tungusic nations of north and central Asia, rose to peaks of political power employing Chinese methods of organization and operation.