Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, or Sunzi Bingfa, is written in a terse style that exudes timeless wisdom, but it was a product of its time, the Warring States period, and it was just one voice in China’s “great conversation” about war and the state, T. Greer reminds us, citing Andrew Seth Meyer:
[In the Sunzi] all mention of sacrifice is eliminated, telegraphing the text’s contention that martial matters must be viewed in purely material terms. Rather than “warfare,” the “military” is held up as the great affair of state, implying (as the text goes on to elaborate) that there are uses for military power beyond the ‘honorable’ contest of arms. Moreover, the word that the Sunzi uses by reference to the “military,” bing, does not evoke the aristocratic charioteer but the common foot soldier, who had become the backbone of the Warring States army.