This chapter examines the ethics of war in Ancient China, focusing specifically on the development of Warring States political philosophy. It argues that the development of humanitarian values originated in the formation of the sovereign states system during the Warring States period. As states arose, they increasingly relied on peasant labor for agricultural resources and miltiary expeditions, which led to the development of political and moral ideas that reflected theinterests of ordinary people. Political theorists from the major intellectual schools (e.g., Confucianism, Taoism, and Mohims) developed humanitarian ideas as a way of reflecting the interests of the people. Throughout, it examines textual evidence that shows that humanitarian ideals shaped how Warring States theorists approached issues of war and peace.

Comparative cross-disciplinary study shows how East Asian thought, theater, and poetry, while situating cultural analogies, helpedshape Brecht’s work. The narrative clarity anddistancing techniques of Japanese theater undercut superficial naturalism, and comparison with sophisticated, graceful Chinese theater later relativized his own. In Chinese philosophy he encountered witty discrimination, an estranging critique of virtues, dialectical social interrelations, a stimulating flow of things, focus on practical engagement, warnings (apropos Confucius) of accommodation with power and, in his crucial Me-ti, what he intimated to Korsch as an “anti-systematic … epic science” realized through individual productivity, not by a top-down imposed social order. East Asian imagination stimulated an unconventional aesthetics. In ethics, the social paradox of self-love would avoid turning people into “the servants of priests.” Even another global politics once briefly seemed conceivable, when China appeared to confront European Stalinism, but in the end that revolution disappointed as well.

This article develops Brecht’s anti-metaphysical and materialist ethics through a close reading of “The Great Method,” a short text from his Me-ti that, in just three sentences, articulates a code of conduct for the revolutionary struggle. This article tries to show that even though “The Great Method” is based on the dialectics of Hegel, Marx, and Lenin, it also reflects Brecht’s interest in classical Chinese thought, in particular the Taoist notion of a subject’s full immersion in the situation requiring an ethical decision (Zhuangzi) and the assumption of an “efficacy that stems from disposition” (François Jullien), which, for example, underpins Brecht’s insistence on linguistic precision and use of modelbooks. This article also emphasizes the central role of production for Brecht’s ethics: “The Great Method” aims to unleash the human potential for productivity in all its forms, beyond capitalism, but is less interested in the production of things than in the production of change in things.

On the publication of the Chinese translation of the Pisan Cantos, the poet Yang Lian observed that now, in the Chinese language, The Cantos had achieved its full realization. For those of us who can read The Cantos only in English and a smattering of Western tongues, this is a somewhat disheartening proposition, yet the very suggestion resonates with a whole cluster of issues bound up with the central role that China came to play in Pound’s work. One might think the topic of China in Pound’s writings had been exhaustively covered, especially discussions of Cathay and Ernest Fenollosa’s essay on written Chinese as a medium for poetry, yet there is no abatement in the seemingly inexhaustible re-treading of old ground along with new approaches.