Guo Huaruo


Guo Huaruo was a Chinese military strategist and lieutenant general of the People's Liberation Army. According to Alastair Iain Johnston, Guo was until the mid-1980s "the CCP's most authoritative interpreter and annotator" of The Art of War by Sun Tzu, but Guo was "practically unknown in the West".
Johnson said 'Guo stressed that from a Marxist–Leninist perspective the notion of "not fighting and subduing the enemy"'—the core of the conventional interpretation of Sun Zi—was un-Marxist, since class enemies could not be credibly defeated without the application of violence.'
Around June 4, 1937, Guo was the dean of studies of Qingyang Infantry School.

Works

Guo wrote A Preliminary Study of Sun Tzu's Art of War, which was completed in 1939. It was used as a military textbook in areas controlled by Communists. The book says "The position Kuo has now enjoyed as a leading military theoretician seems to date from that period."
By 1971, Guo's latest edition of The Art of War was A Modern Translation with New Chapter Arrangement of Sun Tzu's ʻArt of Warʼ. In this edition, Guo rearranged the material, used Simplified Chinese, and phrased Sun Tzu's verses in colloquial Chinese.

List of works