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The Protracted Game
    Keywords: Culture & History

The Protracted Game: A Wei-Ch'i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy by Scott A. Boorman, Oxford University Press 1969

This book tries to use go strategies to explain those used by Mao Tse-tung.

From pp 5-6:

It is safe to assume that, historically, there has probably been considerable interaction between the strategy of wei-ch'i and the strategy used in Chinese warfare. If indeed wei-ch'i and Chinese Communist Strategy are products of the same strategic tradition, wei-ch'i may be more realistically used as an analogic model of that strategy than any purely theoretical structure generated by a Western social scientist.

...

A more direct and positive factor contributing to the potential value of wei-ch'i as a strategic decision model of Chinese Communist insurgent strategy is to found in the presence of significant comparisons between the strategy of the game and that of the revolution in the writings of Mao Tse-tung. In May 1938, in his important essay Problems of Strategy in Guerrilla War against Japan, Mao wrote:

Thus there are two forms of encirclement by the enemy forces and two forms of encirclement by our own--rather like the game of weichi. Campaigns and battles fought by the two sides resemble the capturing of each other's pieces, and the establishment of strongholds by the enemy and of guerrilla base areas by us resembles moves to dominate spaces on the board. It is in the matter of "dominating the spaces" that the great strategic role of guerrilla base areas in the rear of the enemy is revealed.

Scott Boorman is now in the Sociology Department of the University of Yale.

From the faculty web page:

Scott A. Boorman, Ph.D. (Harvard University, 1973), Professor of Sociology and Research Affiliate, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, was a Junior Fellow, Society of Fellows, Harvard University, 1970-73 and Professor of Public Policy and Economics at the University of Pennsylvania, 1974-76. He is a mathematical sociologist interested in developing new mathematical phenomenology for complex social structures and processes, as well as a graduate of the Yale Law School and a member of the Bars of New York and Massachusetts. His research in recent years has been in models for evolutionary biosociology, blockmodel algorithms for the empirical description of social networks, and the theory of complex statutory evolution, and analysis of social processes that involve alternatives to rational choice. His publications include:

  • The Protracted Game: A Wei-ch'i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy (1969);
  • "Island Models for Takeover by a Social Trait Facing a Frequency-dependent Selection Barrier in a Mendelian Population," Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A., 1974, 71, 2103-2107;
  • "A Combinatorial Optimization Model for Transmission of Job Information Through Contact Networks," Bell Journal of Economics, 1975, 6, 216-49;
  • The Genetics of Altruism (1980) (with Paul R. Levitt);
  • "Blockmodeling Complex Statutes: Mapping Techniques Based on Combinatorial Optimization for Analyzing Economic Legislation and Its Stress Points Over Time," Economics Letters, 1983, 13, 1-9 (with Paul R. Levitt);
  • Alternatives to Rational Choice: Anayltical Outline of Substantive Area. Part I, Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, Cowles Foundation Preliminary Paper No. 001013 (October 13, 2000).


This is a copy of the living page "The Protracted Game" at Sensei's Library.
(C) the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.