By Dr Bertrand Ramcharan Seventh Chancellor of the University of Guyana Previously Fellow of Harvard University and of the LSE. Henry Kissinger, in his book, On China, wrote that the Chinese have been shrewd practitioners of realpolitik and students of a strategic doctrine distinctly different from the strategy and diplomacy of the West. Chinese thinkers, he thought, developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.
What had distinguished Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy was his emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military ones. China is a vast country with a population of some 1.3 billion, and containing over fifty ethnic nationalities.
It considers itself under various security threats from within and without. It is determined to regain control of Taiwan, which the USA has historically asserted a right to protect. It has had to deal with manifestations of what it considers extremism and terrorism.
It is determined to maintain the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country and to ward off ‘splittists’. China, having been the victim of imperial aggression in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, set out, after the Communist revolution of 1949, to restore her dignity and that of her people, to advance their development and welfare, and to match the power of the Western hegemon, the United States of America. There were mistakes along.
