Books in Brief: The Protracted Game

The Protracted Game: A Wei-Ch’i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy, by Scott A. Boorman (Oxford, $7.50).

Who “lost” China? Maybe the lesser weich’i player. Wei-ch’i, better known as Japanese go, is an ancient, highly abstract, extraordinarily subtle two-man game played with 361 white and black stones on a board containing 361 intersections. Players try to extend their control of territory, encircling opponents (capturing hostile stones), marking off spheres of interest. Even more complex than chess, wei-ch’i is a non-zero sum game in which victory and defeat are relative phenomena. Terms like “economy,” “harmony,” “dialectic of discontinuous connections,” and “mobility” are regularly employed. Boorman describes the game and shows the correspondence between wei-ch’i and guerrilla insurgency of the successful Chinese Communist type,

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D. J. C. Brudnoy

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The Protracted Game: A Wei-Ch’i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy, by Scott A. Boorman (Oxford, $7.50).

Who “lost” China? Maybe the lesser weich’i player. Wei-ch’i, better known as Japanese go, is an ancient, highly abstract, extraordinarily subtle two-man game played with 361 white and black stones on a board containing 361 intersections. Players try to extend their control of territory, encircling opponents (capturing hostile stones), marking off spheres of interest. Even more complex than chess, wei-ch’i is a non-zero sum game in which victory and defeat are relative phenomena. Terms like “economy,” “harmony,” “dialectic of discontinuous connections,” and “mobility” are regularly employed. Boorman describes the game and shows the correspondence between wei-ch’i and guerrilla insurgency of the successful Chinese Communist type,