Yet a closer look reveals Sun Tzu's flaws as a tool of soft power.
They may not be as old as those of Sun Tzu, but they are surely battle-tested and battle-proven by now.
When facing a powerful opponent on a field of combat Sun Tzu advises, in the Art of War, to attack the weakest points.
In the tradition of Sun Tzu, Chinese analysts of IW assert that knowledge can be assembled together in a rational and coherent manner that would produce inevitable victory.
The essence of China's thinking about cyber warfare is the concept of shi, he says, first introduced in Sun Tzu's "The Art of War" about 2, 500 years ago.
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In June the county, whose tyre, petrochemical and paper-making industries have made it much richer than Huimin, held a foundation-stone ceremony for its own Sun Tzu theme park.
Not surprisingly, Sun Tzu is interwoven into this emerging theory.
It is not being helped by fierce competition with another county 100km (60 miles) away, Guangrao, which in recent years has been laying a rival claim as Sun Tzu's birthplace.
Lake mentioned these four: Passion and Purpose by John Mackey , How to Become a Social Intrapreneur by Nathan Springer, Never Give In by Winston Churchill, and Art of War by Sun Tzu.
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Developed largely from his study of the ancient Chinese theoretician Sun Tzu and Prussian military reformers of the 19th century, the theory explains how a combatant can defeat the enemy on the mental battlefield, before the real shooting starts.
Whether Chinese strategists have something useful to contribute analytically by looking through the lens of Sun Tzu or whether they have deluded themselves into accepting the capacity of information power to lift the fog of war remains to be seen.
We read von Clauswitz and Sun-Tzu on strategy and Musashi on combat.
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