Mark Leenhouts presents an exploration of Sunzi’s The Art of War, followed by an insightful  interview alongside Catherine Vuylsteke, where they will delve deeper into the subject. The session will conclude with a Q&A with the audience, inviting engagement and discussion.

Sunzi’s The Art of War, or Master Sun’s treatise, is one of the best-known works of the Chinese written tradition and one of the few classical texts on warfare in world literature.

Sunzi’s The Art of War has become a classic that lives on in widely applicable maxims such as “know the other, know yourself,” even far beyond the military realm, as shown by the proliferation of titles like Sunzi’s Warfare for Managers.

With this first Dutch translation from the Chinese, however, we return to the work’s original literary and philosophical source.

Despite being 2,500 years old, the text has not lost its relevance—largely because Master Sun does not focus on technical matters such as the training or organisation of an army. Instead, he adopts a higher, conceptual perspective concerned with strategy and tactics. His central argument is that physical warfare should in fact be avoided for as long as possible, if only to prevent the waste of strength, lives, and resources. There is a Taoist, nature-inspired dimension to this stance, as well as to the absence of any appeal to Confucian virtue or battlefield heroics.