What do you think people most often get wrong about “The Art of War”?

I think there is a basic misunderstanding that it’s not really about war — it’s about preventing war. From very early times, the Chinese attitude toward warfare was that you need to end it as quickly as possible. The way to do that was to use irregular fighting: special strategies and tactics so that you could minimize the loss of life and the damage to crops and villages and so on. This started very early in Chinese history. Sunzi says the point of warfare is not the fighting but the winning. He says that anger can turn to happiness later, but a dead person can’t be brought back to life. A country that is lost can’t be brought back either. So the main goal of war from a Chinese perspective is to avoid it at all costs, or to figure out how to win while suffering the least amount of damage.

Can you expand on that idea of preventing warfare?

One way to think about it is when the Chinese settled and became an agricultural society, they had some valuable land, and it would often be attacked by outsiders. So they had to figure out how to defend it. War was not about imperialists going to take something from someone else; it was about defending. If you think about the Great Wall, the Great Wall was not built to attack or to take over somebody else’s land. It was to keep out invaders. China actually had very few horses in the oldest days, like in Sunzi’s time, so they had to figure out ways to fight these advancing cavalries. They had to be very clever about it. If you look at “The Art of War,” it’s about preparation. Only very little of it is about how to actually fight, and I think that people tend to neglect that.

You served in the military for a time yourself. Can you tell me a little about it?

I went into the Taiwanese military in 1968 when I was 20 years old. I was in the air force. In Taiwan, it was always as if a war was coming but the war never actually came. The Chinese on the mainland were shelling one of Taiwan’s islands in the Taiwan Strait, and it was a very scary time. But really, most of the time, it was just for show. We would sit in the barracks and play chess and so on. So in one sense, in my lifetime that I’ve been in Taiwan, there hasn’t been a war at all. You could call me very fortunate.

I was in an antiaircraft artillery unit, and I went to my commanding officer and said: “Look, I’m very good at drawing. It would be a waste to have me just standing guard eight hours a day,” which was basically what people in my unit did. They gave me the job of drawing instruction manuals for these three different kinds of antiaircraft guns we had. And as I drew them, I also inserted stories so they would be more enjoyable for the soldiers to read and understand. I’m not very good at taking orders, so I tried to find a place in the military where I could live in a way where I didn’t feel like I was actually in the military.