If the Chinese have Sun-Tzu, we also have our own Nitishastra and Arthashastra.

Everything fundamental about human attitude to war has been explained in texts like Shantiparva.

Chinese take recourse to their their civilizational wisdom in matters of strategy, we also should.

I was reading this old strategy research report from US Army War College. It makes lots of useful points regarding the sources of Chinese strategy doctrine.

"What the Chinese learned fron Sun-Tzu"

http://www.iwar.org.uk/military/resources/sun-tzu/Holmes_S_L_01.pdf

As per the paper, the Chinese have a weak-state, strong-state calculation around periphery control. This follows from Sun-Tzu's doctrine regarding war and its avoidance.

When in weak-state, diplomatic/economic means are used for pacification instead of ouright military hostility

Another concept is "constrained maximisation".

It involves non-provocative stance with restraint in the use of force while working on economic growth and securing asymmetric gains in multilateral forums.

"If the dispute is significant but cannot be resolved rapidly to China’s advantage by peaceful means, Beijing has advocated an indefinite postponement of the basic issue."

The most interesting part of the paper is how it talks about 2020 (yep) as a cutoff mark by which international transformation is achieved. And then China will take either of the two roles - assertive or cooperative.

Looking at the state of the world right now, we know which.

cc: @parasratna @KamalMadishetty