Assassin's MACE?

摘要

For any military commander seeking to pass through staff college, the writings of Sun Tzu are a crucial source of insight. Despite the passage of time, many of his quotations still punctuate presentations and essays of the Western world's future military leaders as they seek to progress through their careers. While Chinese defence academies pay similar homage to the content in what was Sun Tzu's major work, The Art of War, recent essays have also placed an emphasis on another piece of Chinese military history: a weapon that is initially concealed in the course of a battle only to be drawn at the critical point to surprise the adversary. In Chinese it is referred to as Shashoujian- in English, the Assassin's Mace. For these emerging military doctrine writers in China, reference to the Assassin's Mace enables them to draw on a piece of Chinese history and place it in a contemporary setting, albeit in a slightly different form.