More than once, clients have told me that “you must be a chess player.” I actually am not. I have always found chess too slow, too boring, too lacking in action and too contemplative. It isn’t me.
I am a backgammon player. Backgammon requires compiling a plan, but being willing to rapidly change it, depending on what your opponent does. It see Backgammon as a more reactive, more aggressive, less contemplative game than chess and I think it far more closely mirrors the practice of law, at least the way I practice.
I do think the games that we play influence the way that we think, and vice-versa.
The Wall Street Journal had an article today, entitled, What Kind of Game Is China Playing? that posits the same thing. It is about how David Lai, a professor at the Army War College, is of the view that if Americans want to learn more about China’s foreign policy plans, we should learn the Chinese board game of wei qi, known in the U.S. as Go. According to Lai, learning Go “can teach non-Chinese how to see the geostrategic “board” the same way that Chinese leaders do”
According to the article, Go is “starkly different” from chess:
Go features multiple battles over a wide front, rather than a single decisive encounter. It emphasizes long-term planning over quick tactical advantage, and games can take hours. In Chinese, its name, wei qi (roughly pronounced “way-chee”), means the “encirclement game.”
The game, already well known in the days of Confucius and still wildly popular in Asia, is starkly different from chess, the classic Western game of strategy. The object of Go is to place stones on the open board, balancing the need to expand with the need to build protected clusters.
Lai sees Go as “the perfect reflection of Chinese strategic thinking and their operational art.” It seems Henry Kissinger agrees:
Throughout his new book, “On China,” Mr. Kissinger uses wei qi to explain how Chinese leaders such as Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping managed crises during the Korean War, disputes over Taiwan, the Vietnam War, conflicts throughout Southeast Asia and with the Soviet Union, and the normalization of relations with the U.S.
In the first days of the Korean conflict, for example, President Harry Truman sent U.S. troops to South Korea and the U.S. Navy to the Taiwan strait. He had, “in Chinese eyes,” Mr. Kissinger writes, “placed two stones on the wei qi board, both of which menaced China with the dreaded encirclement.” Thus, despite being war-weary and impoverished, China felt the need to confront the U.S. directly.
What do you think? Is Go a good way to anaylze China’s foreign policy actions? Is it a good way to analyze China business decision-making? Is Go really that instructive?
