Lei Haizong’s Chinese Culture and the Chinese Military, as translated by George Fleming, is a fascinating and valuable x-ray of China during the Nanjing Decade and the early Second World War in China. This version was first published in 2014 by The Commercial Press and has been republished by the Cambridge University Press. Originally writing in the late 1930s, Lei (1902-1962, Lei being his surname) stripped analysis to the bones of ancient Chinese military history and provided an alternative skeleton on which to consider China’s wartime plight. Lei had very strong views, as did many Chinese of that period, of anger towards China’s foreign oppressors, of patriotism and pride for China and China’s culture, and of hope and fear for the future, all unavoidably linked with China’s “Century of Humiliation”, which under the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has now stretched into the 21st Century. As a former supporter of the Guomindang (previous ruling party of China), Lei has been rehabilitated by the CCP from the CCP’s “Rightist Label”, and then elevated to even higher heights as the CCP saw remnants of his usefulness.

Lei’s work is not necessarily a conclusive understanding of actual ancient Chinese military history, but rather provides a perhaps unintentional insight into the Chinese intellectual mindset struggling to make sense of the turbulence in Lei’s times. To his credit, Lei challenged academic complacency and saw military institutions as more than just administrative machinery, but also as expressions of deeper assumptions about social rank, discipline, education, legitimacy, and collective purpose.

Chinese Culture and the Chinese Military begins with “China’s Military”, “Chinese Clans”, and “Heads of State”; describing Ancient China’s rise and fall of militarism as a core explanatory thread in Chinese history, how Chinese clan structures shaped and limited China’s political integration, and the political move from China’s ancient multi-state order into a single absolute, sacralized emperorship.

Part I continues with “A-military Culture”, Lei’s main foundation, which presents the main cause of China’s long-term stagnation as the loss of genuine military citizenship through political ossification, distorted civil-military relations, repetitive dynastic turnover, and chronic weakness in dealing with disorder and external threats. “Two Cycles of Chinese Culture” presents Lei’s full theory of historical periodization, dividing Chinese history into two great cultural cycles to provide a single long-range account of Chinese history, rather than forced into imported European or Marxist stage schemes. Lei described the ancient dynamic and militaristic First Cycle followed by a long complacent Second Cycle of stagnation up to Lei’s present, with Lei’s hoped for Third Cycle of regeneration.

In Part II, “The Place in History of the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression” shifts to wartime interpretation and presents the war against the Japanese Empire as a historic turning point capable of breaking the exhausted old pattern of Chinese history. The war is not only a military matter but also evidence that Chinese culture still had the energy to regenerate itself. “State Building: Hope for a Third Cycle of Culture” proposes a political program to convert wartime sacrifice into disciplined reconstruction, stronger national purpose, and a new synthesis of civil and martial virtues; to inaugurate a “third cycle” of Chinese culture.

Appendices which show Lei’s broadness follow with Lei’s “Alternatives to Dynastic Succession”, “Shang and Zhou Dynasty Chronology”, “Gentlemen, Real and Fake”, “Yayue and Xinsheng: History of a Musical Revolution”, and “Climate and Agriculture in Northern China from Antiquity to the Present Day”. These take on foreign forms of political succession, using generational average spans to estimate pre-modern calendars of the Shang and Zhou period, describing Chinese elite moral and political decay through China’s historical “gentleman”, contrasting ancient court music with the “new sounds” to hear civilizational change, and reflecting on agricultural prospects and practical questions such as irrigation with ancient texts about North China.

Lei’s former student, Wang Dunshu, then provides a reader’s guide to Lei’s career and intellectual development, and Wang’s explanation of why Lei’s book mattered and how it fits into twentieth-century Chinese historical thought.

Those unused to academic jargon creation and hairsplitting might chafe at Lei’s insistence on seemingly pedantic reclassifications and reorganizations. And Lei’s repeated use of “it needs no further explanation” too often moves from fragmentary evidence to sweeping civilizational conclusions, and from ancient cases to contemporary diagnoses, without enough intermediate demonstration. Single cases, admittedly reconstructed from limited evidence, become templates for broad civilizational propositions. Lei’s inferences often may be plausible, but Lei rarely pauses long enough to develop credibility.

Furthermore, Tang Dynasty militarization, Song Dynasty conquests, Ming Dynasty military investments, and Qing imperial expansion arguably counter Lei’s claim that there was a “Second Cycle” during which China’s militarism ebbed away. There was nothing inherently pacifist about Chinese governments’ views of war; aggression and expansionism, military service, and military elites existed throughout China’s history. Nor would there generally ever be any difference for any government tasked with any large land mass surrounded by competitors.

However, Lei can be excused for reading the past under the extreme pressure of his contemporary political agenda. China’s wartime emergency required urgency, and encouraged Lei to force ancient evidence into a modern civilizational diagnosis. Lei was not writing a cautious monograph; he was using history to prescribe an antidote for China’s then national weakness. Chinese Culture and the Chinese Military is best read in that light, more as historiographical insight rather than as actual history.

In addition, understanding the mindset caught in a desperate existential struggle with a foreign power, the Japanese Empire, and unfulfilled pride in over three thousand years of culture muddled by the all-too apparently superior foreign influences, western technologies and Marxist ideology, can provide valuable insight into current CCP policies. After all, Lei’s current high status, now officially rehabilitated, is a sign of the CCP’s current favor and intentions. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) is currently filled with the CCP’s own propaganda of competing with a hostile Superpower, and despite the PRC’s super-nationalistic jingoism, the CCP is still copying western techniques and parroting a foreign ideology. And while Lei Haizong’s fate will likely be shared by all those who force march to such drums, as Josef Stalin once offered, for use and then be tossed “away like a squeezed-out lemon”, astute observers might glean, through Lei, currents of CCP thought processes.

Nonetheless, the CCP might not like the results of Lei’s deeper hard question: what happens to a civilization when military capability and martial values lose legitimacy? Lei was quite explicit on how even ancient governments plotted to take away people’s weapons with which the people could challenge authority. The PRC has draconian gun control. Lei described how the lack of universal conscription degraded China’s strength. The PRC currently has only a nominal conscription system. Lei described the importance of population and physical fitness. The PRC has a declining population and increasing health issues. Lei noted that the endurance of Chinese script is a factor in China’s longevity. The PRC simplified and gutted traditional Chinese. Lei also warned against bureaucratic fossilization through ideological purity. The PRC is a one-party state currently supposedly operating with Xi Jinping thought. And Lei stated that a “classless society, no matter how wonderful it may sound in theory, is in reality always heaps of loose sand” (p.97], which needs no further explanation.

Lei is valuable reading as a historical backdrop for his period, but also as an indication of the current CCP mindset. Unlike in an open society where tolerated ideas do not necessarily indicate any controlling thought, allowed utterances in an authoritarian censorship regime suggests at a minimum that there is a power faction which believes in some facet of that perspective. Accordingly, the “authorized” Lei is worth reading if only to divine current CCP thought. But even when inevitably the “authorized” Lei is tossed away like other squeezed-out lemons, his contribution towards expanding the discourse of history and memorializing the sentiments of his own times will retain value.

Our Reviewer: Ching Wah Chin, a member of NYMAS, has lectured and written widely on East Asian History. His reviews include The Pacific War and Contingent Victory: Why Japanese Defeat Was Not Inevitable, Nanjing 1937: Battle for a Doomed City, The 1929 Sino-Soviet War, War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat, Future War and the Defence of Europe, Nations in the Balance: The India-Burma Campaign, December 1943-August 1944, Ring of Fire: A New History of the World at War, 1914, All the World at War, On a Knife Edge: How Germany Lost the First World War, China's Spies, The Greater Second World War, and War in Modern China.

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Note: Chinese Culture and the Chinese Military is also available in hard cover & e-editions.

StrategyPage reviews are published in cooperation with The New York Military Affairs Symposium