The game of chess has long been associated with strategy and the art of statecraft. Indeed, during the 1972 World Chess Championship in the midst of the Cold War, such emphasis was placed on the match that former chess champion Garry Kasparov would later recount that the subsequent American victory “was treated by people on both sides of the Atlantic as a crushing moment in the midst of the Cold War.” With the 20th century now a mere chapter in our history books, the dissolution of the Soviet Union has left a new player on the world’s chessboard: China. This time, however, the United States (U.S.) does not have the privilege of having its rival playing the same game. No longer can a game theory approach to geopolitics be viewed purely in terms of chess. To truly examine the Chinese approach to politics, we must examine the roots of their cultural interpretation of strategic thought, known as the ‘shi’ (勢), through their own game of strategy--Wei Qi--colloquially referred to by the rest of the world as ‘Go.’
Despite it being the basis upon which Chinese military and political strategy has been historically built, the Chinese concept of shi has remained untranslatable to the English language. The U.S. military, however, has long taken an interest in demystifying the concept, with the Department of Defense describing the term in their 2002 Annual Report on the Military Power of the People’s Republic of China as the “potential born of disposition…that only a skilled strategist can exploit to ensure victory over a superior force.” Sun Tzu, a famous ancient Chinese strategist and attributed progenitor of the concept of shi, added nuance to this definition through his allusion to the concept in his treatise, The Art of War, another piece of Chinese heritage that can help in understanding Chinese strategic thought. In his magnum opus, Sun Tzu refers to shi as the ability to “[make] the enemy move… by creating a situation to which he must conform.” With both ancient and contemporary interpretations taken into account, we can confidently presume that the essence of shi derives from a strategic advantage created through the manipulation of the environment and changing circumstances, a technique heavily utilized in the game of Wei Qi.
Appearing as early as 400 BC in the works of Confucius and speculated to have been practiced for millennia earlier, the game of Wei Qi is a game of unparalleled historical and strategic value. It’s viewed as a practical simulacrum of Sun Tzu’s aforementioned military treatise, Art of War as well as being one of the four arts historically seen as necessary for Chinese scholar-officials. The game involves two players strategically placing colored stones on a square grid for the purpose of surrounding and capturing the opponent’s stones whilst also preventing them from doing the same. A player’s stones are not required to be placed adjacently, often resulting in multiple attempts of encirclement across the board occurring simultaneously.
Chess, a hallmark of Western strategic thought and game theory, has always placed a heavy emphasis on relative strength and hierarchy. Dr. David Lai, a professor at the American Strategic Studies Institute, notes that the effect of this mindset has been just as detrimental to the U.S. as it has been beneficial, noting that while it has led to Americans “[tending] to pay more attention to the balance of military power in conflict situations,” the emphasis placed on total war leads the player “[becoming] overly aggressive so that he will stretch his force thin and expose his vulnerable parts in the battlefields.” This single-minded desire for victory is no doubt a doctrinal product of Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military strategist known for his seminal military treatise On War, arguably the Western equivalent of Sun Tzu’s work and incontestably as influential. In his work, Clausewitz extolls the importance of a proverbial “center of gravity” in warfare, wherein a single, watershed battle, will always be the deciding factor in a war. The strategic thought developed from thinking in terms of shi and Wei Qi, however, could not be more different. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was no doubt correct in his belief that, “if chess is about the decisive battle, Wei Qi is about the protracted campaign.”
Contrary to chess’ uncompromising emphasis on the order of command and complete decimation of the enemy, Wei Qi is played in such a way that multiple offenses occur in various areas of the board, forcing the player to examine the situation holistically and contradict Clausewitz’s center of gravity and, by extension, Western military theory. In the same vein, speed and relative power in Wei Qi is of little importance since each stone is equal in value. In the context of military strategy, this often encourages a protracted war since the game cannot be won immediately upon the death of a single, valuable piece. With these radically different methods and goals in mind, one can see these differences in priorities take shape in China’s military and foreign policy.
One can see an exemplary instance of Wei Qi and, subsequently, shi coming into practice during one of the most pivotal moments of Chinese history, the Chinese Civil War. During this time, Communist Chinese forces would often be surrounded due to the superior manpower of the Chinese Nationalist forces, an occurrence that would be described by Communist soldiers as a “[campaigns] of encirclement and annihilation.” This would often result in a counter-encirclement in which Communist forces would retreat in the hope that, “while the retreat was in progress and contact with the enemy broken or sporadic,” they would be able to deny Nationalist forces an encirclement. Eventually, as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) turned the tide of the war in the wake of Japan’s withdrawal from the mainland, their increasingly aggressive retaliatory offensives resulted in a situation “in which the previous Communist and Nationalist roles were reversed,” with the PRC now adopting encirclement tactics as soon as they were in a position to do so. This dance of encirclement and counter-encirclement performed by Nationalist and Communist forces is not unlike two types of stones on a Wei Qi board, wherein the only way to prevent an enemy from surrounding and removing one’s pieces is to maneuver past the enemy until the time is ripe to respond in kind. The founder of the People’s Republic of China, Mao Zedong, is known to have related the popularity of this doctrine to the game of Wei Qi himself in his 1938 treatise, Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War Against Japan, wherein he would go on to state that the “campaigns and battles fought by the two sides resemble the capturing of each other's pieces, and the establishment of strongholds by the enemy and of guerrilla base areas by us resembles moves to dominate spaces on the board.”
As the world slowly transitions from a unilateral American-dominated international system towards a multilateral world order, American policymakers would do well to realize that there is often more than one game of strategy being played. There are a multitude of possible solutions that may serve to reconcile this shift in tactical norms with the United States’ traditional Clausewitzian strategic thought. One such proposition, put forward by former U.S. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich, involves encouraging U.S. policymakers to master the game of Wei Qi themselves. This recommendation was based on the belief that the flexible thinking developed through the game would serve to ameliorate the traditional rigidity--and thus perceived weakness--of American strategic thought whilst also augmenting the United States’ traditional advantages of “strength, capabilities, ingenuity, and American spirit.” This advocation for doctrinal synthesis is further reinforced by the conclusions of Dr. David Lai, a professor at the Strategic Studies Institute. Dr. Lai likened China’s flexibility and the United States’ rigid hierarchy to the yin and yang, two opposing forces in Chinese culture that create balance through their reconciliation. There are, however, those who oppose this consensus and express skepticism towards attributing all of China’s strategic initiatives to a mindset influenced by Wei Qi and the concept of the shi.
One such case is that of Lauren Dickey, a research analyst under the CNA corporation’s China-Indo-Pacific Division, who arguesthat the U.S. must “move away from a reliance upon cultural traditions as a causal link between Chinese strategic thought.” Dickey instead believes that the Chinese are merely pursuing a policy of realpolitik and that any connection between such policy and the Chinese culture is a misattribution. Nonetheless, the general consensus does imply that the game of Wei Qi has the possibility to yield invaluable insight into the Chinese concept of shi and, subsequently, China’s unique strategic methodology.