Bibliographic Essay
Violence as an independent topic has received relatively infrequent attention in the context of early China, although there have been quite a few studies on it in later times. By far the most useful reference for locating Western-language research on violence in all periods of Chinese history is Barend ter Haar's ‘Violence in Chinese Culture', https:// bjterhaa.home.xs4all.nl/violence.htm, accessed 3 July 2019.
The best study is Mark Edward Lewis's Sanctioned Violence in Early China (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1999). Here Lewis employs a broad conception of violence and draws on an array of sources to examine social development during the Warring States period in terms of violence. Barend ter Haar has published articles on violence in various periods, including ‘Rethinking “Violence” in Chinese Culture', in Goran Aijmer and Jon Abbink (eds.), Meanings of Violence: A Cross Cultural Perspective (Oxford: Berg, 2000). A notable article on the hermeneutics of the Annals and its commentaries is Newell Ann Van Auken, ‘Killings and Assassinations in the Spring and Autumn as Records of Judgment', Asia Major n.s. 27.1 (2014), 1-31.Due to the paucity of secondary studies, the best way to examine the role of violence often remains direct engagement with the texts. Many scholars have translated the Analects, a text whose brevity belies its complexity. D. C. Lau's translation, often
Violence in Early Chinese History reprinted and republished by Penguin and others, is a worthy balance of strictness, readability and sophistication. A much needed complete and new translation of the Zuo Commentary is Stephen Durrant, Wai-ye Li and David Schaberg, Zuo Tradition / Zuozhuan: Commentary on the ‘Spring and Autumn Annals' (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2017), while a new translation of The Book of Lord Shang by Yuri Pines was published by Columbia University Press in 2017.
The Art of War has been the subject of innumerable books, many of which are aimed at popular audiences.
For a notable translation which makes use of an excavated manuscript version of the text, see Roger T. Ames (trans.), Sun-tzu: The Art of Warfare. The First English Translation Incorporating the Recently Discovered Yin-ch'ueh-shan Texts (New York: Ballantine, 1993). For a recent scholarly study, see Derek M. C. Yuen, Deciphering Sun Tzu: How to Read ‘The Art of War' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014). One issue related to violence that has received attention concerns the philosophical questions around the acceptability of military force in various periods; see, for example, the articles in Peter A. Lorge (ed.), Debating War in Chinese History (Leiden: Brill, 2013).The limited number of scholarly treatments of violence means that interested readers may wish to seek information in broader studies of Chinese history. The best overviews of the early periods remain Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.), The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 BC (Cambridge, 1999), and Denis Twitchett and Michael Loewe (eds.), The Cambridge History of China, vol. i, The Ch'in and Han Empires, 221BC-AD 220 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). There is a readable synthetic treatment of the foundational imperial period in Mark Edward Lewis, The Early Chinese Empires: Qin and Han (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007).