Samuel Griffith went to New College, Oxford University, after retiring on March 1, 1956. He had made contact with Basil Liddell Hart by the middle of 1957, and Liddell Hart soon agreed to read and comment on Griffith’s dissertation. Liddell Hart made extensive comments on the dissertation as it was being read, and Griffith mentions reading Liddell Hart’s Strategy: The Indirect Approach. Griffith also believed that Chinese strategy was fundamentally different than Western strategy, with the possible exception of Liddell Hart’s strategy. Griffith also assumed, and consequently asserted without evidence, that Mao Zedong’s strategy was consistent with Sunzi. This was also due to Griffith’s connection between guerrilla warfare, Mao, and Sunzi, a connection that was particularly strong because he had translated Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare when he was in China. Griffith also asserted that Communist strategy, even before Mao, was based on Sunzi. It was also important for the dissertation to try to determine whether Sunzi had been influential in Western military thought before the twentieth century. Griffith’s biases, in addition to those of Liddell Hart, affected his choice of translation terms as much the introductory explanation of Sunzi.

Liddell Hart’s Foreword to Samuel Griffith’s 1963 translation of Sunzi is the locus classicus for the interpretation that Sunzi advocated an “indirect approach” to strategy. Liddell Hart asserted that Sunzi was the world’s greatest military thinker, with only Clausewitz comparable, if dated, and that much of the suffering caused by World War I and World War II would have been avoided if planners had absorbed some of Sunzi’s “realism and moderation” to balance Clausewitz’s theoretical emphasis on “‘total war’ beyond all bounds of sense.” Although Sunzi appeared in Europe with a French translation in the late eighteenth century, and appealed to the “rational trend of eighteenth-century thinking about war,” it was not influential because of “the emotional surge of the Revolution.” A new and complete translation was needed, particularly with the appearance of nuclear weapons, and with China becoming a great power under Mao Zedong.