“Modern Chinese Warfare 1795-1989” by Bruce Elleman

For those interested in military history, possible contemporary confrontations with the People’s Liberation Army over Taiwan, North Korea, or the South China Sea, those who wish to do business with mainland China, or just those who want to have a better understanding of the “Chinese mind” I recommend Elleman’s book. He reviews every military engagement, internal and external, by the Chinese from the Taiping Rebellion through Tiananmen Square. He shows how internal power struggles, primarily the Manchu effort during the Qing Dynasty to stay on top of the Han majority and the Nationalist/Communist Civil War, shaped the inward looking formation and skillset of the (Han) PLA even today. He also shows how colonial meddling, from the Sino-French war in China’s vassal state of Annam (modern-day Vietnam) through the Sino-Vietnamese War of 1979 (when the USSR supplied Vietnam, but did not open a second front in the north), has colored today’s China’s perception of foreign “interference”, whether they be the white devil (Britain, France, America) or the yellow devil (Japan). 

The detail of the military engagements is minute, but can be completely skipped over for the psychological factors, if that is your primary interest. I learned more about the Boxer Rebellion and the Sino-Indian border dispute than I ever learned in Chinese history class at university. Elleman views Chinese leaders through a realist lens that Clausewitz or Kissinger could appreciate, “unlike Europe, where warfare gradually became intertwined with questions of morality, ethics, and international law, in the Chinese way of thinking there was no universal law governing war, since the highest possible military and political goal was to achieve unity.” He also quotes Robert Hart on an eternal “fact” of Chinese mentality, “on the Chinese side there is pride, innate pride- pride of race, pride of intellect, pride of civilization, pride of supremacy; and this inherited pride, in its massive and magnificent setting of blissful ignorance, has been so hurt by the manner of foreign impact that the other good points of Chinese character have, as it were, been stunned and cannot respond; it is not simply a claim for equality, or the demonstration of physical superiority, or the expansion of intercourse under compulsion, or the dictation of treaties, that have hurt that pride- were it only these, time would have healed the wound long ago, but it is something in those treaties which keeps open the raw and prevents healing.” Those doing business with the Chinese today, whether it be military, diplomatic, or commercial, should well remember that the Chinese psyche has the memory of an elephant, stretching back centuries, and it will never forget when the Chinese were for so long the doormats and play toys of colonial powers.