Today I will talk about Attacking by Stratagem, It is the third piece of writing of The Art of War. This piece of writing and the previous two as a whole deal with macro strategies in The Art of War. So let’s first briefly talk about the first two pieces of writing. The first piece of writing is Laying Plans. Sun Tzu proposed his idea at the beginning of this piece of writing, “being cautious in war”. It requires a country, and its monarch to be cautious in war. Then how to be cautious? To be specific, being cautious in war is just like providing us an objective measurement framework, by which we can measure whether a country can launch a war or not and the odds of winning a war. This framework is called “five factors and seven stratagems ”. the “macro analytical framework”. By this framework, you can go further to objectively analyze the comprehensive strength of the both sides. And then on the basis of the analysis, you can determine whether the war should be launched or not, and the odds in winning a war. This is the main points in Laying Plans. The second piece of writing is Waging War. In classic Chinese, the word “zuo” means creating and making, so in this piece of writing, it mainly deals with how to prepare for war, and the specific point here is the relationship between economy and war, and it emphasizes the huge economic drain. So the central issue is how to win and how to compress the huge military expenditure so as to achieve the substantial benefit from the war. The substantial benefit here means defeating the enemy to get stronger. That is to say as a result of winning a war, the country will become more powerful and prosperous. This is really a good stratagem. Today we are going to talk about the third piece of writing Attacking by Stratagem. Based on the previous two pieces of writing, it deals with how a country on the macro-strategy level formulates attacking stratagems. Then on macro-strategy level, why attacking is a priority, and stratagem is attacking rather than defending. This relates to a view in the second piece mentioned just now, if your objective is defeating the enemy to get stronger, you should take the offensive on strategic level. for if you take the defensive, you can’t expand your existing benefits , but can only defend your existing benefits. And only by attacking can we achieve the objective. So on strategic level Sun Tzu gives priority to attacking rather than defending. Then how to attack, this issue is dealt with at the very beginning of this piece of writing. The best strategy in the war is to take the enemy’s entire country,and to destroy it is not so good, to take an entire army , and to destroy it is not so good to take an entire brigade, and to destroy it is not so good. to take an entire company, and to destroy it is not so good. to take an entire squad , and to destroy it is not so good. In our words today, when attacking stratagem is made on strategic level, sufficient ambition or wild ambition. must be needed. We must have such ambitions to destroy their entire army, occupy their whole city or even their entire country. The basic idea here is that we must strive for complete victory. After achieving complete victory, Sun Tzu attached an additional condition to it. What’s the additional condition? Hence being ever-victorious is not supreme excellence breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting is supreme excellence These sayings are very familiar to us. That is to say as to the way to win complete victory, Sun Tzu attached a limiting condition to it. That is, we should try to win in a smart way or by stratagem. Then, what is the stratagem? Without fighting. Namely, we just use massive forces as our backup and the basis of our strength. On this basis, we try to adopt other more sensible strategies to achieve our objective of complete victory. To sum up, his first idea is winning a complete victory without fighting. It should be mentioned that it is very hard to achieve. But if we know The Art of War, we should understand that the reason why it has been regarded by later generations as the origin of art of war. and it is practically significant even at present. The main question is that he took into account of all the aspects of war moreover he raised each aspect to a very high level, namely, the absolutely ideal level. He deeply reflected all aspects and then put forward the highest objective. Then what left for us is what level we can reach in practice. So breaking the enemy's resistance without fighting and then achieving a complete victory is the optimal objective on strategic level.