China’s PLA Publishes Collected Works of Clausewitz

The publishing company of the People’s Liberation Army has published ten volumes of the works of Prussian General Carl von Clausewitz (1780-1831) in Chinese. This includes three volumes that encompass his famous work On War. While Clausewitz’s On War has been a staple of Chinese military thinkers from Mao Zedong on, this series includes a variety of political and historical writings which deal with the situation in Germany during the Liberation wars (1813-1814), including a monograph on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia and its subsequent failure. Such a collection would give a better sense of Clausewitz’s conception of strategy, but perhaps also a certain sense of the philosophical currents that were prevalent in that period in Germany, but which have been sorely neglected or obfuscated by our “warriors” here in the West.