The meaning of this sentence is that due to the huge casualties and costs of war, those who can make the enemy surrender without using troops are the best at war.

During the Spring and Autumn Period, among the five overlords who emerged in the Central Plains, the first one to dominate was Duke Huan of Qi. The person who assisted Duke Huan of Qi to ascend to the position of overlord was Guan Zhong, the famous virtuous prime minister in ancient times.

The strategy of this powerful minister could be said to be unparalleled in the world at the time. His understanding and application of economic control methods to seek benefits for the country could almost be said to have achieved the effect of defeating the enemy without fighting.

In the modern history of great power struggle for hegemony, economic warfare has emerged one after another as an important form of war. The leader among them is the United States, the winner of the Cold War and the only superpower in the world today.

In the history of the struggle for hegemony between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States used superb and sophisticated economic warfare, which prevented the "red steel torrent" that had the world's largest nuclear arsenal and conventional weapons and equipment at that time from firing a single bullet. Disintegrate ice.

It split and collapsed under internal economic pressure, thus having the last laugh in the 45-year competition for hegemony.

Coincidentally, when we look through ancient Chinese classics, we can also find that Guan Zhong had already used artistic economic warfare between the two great powers of Qi and Chu in the Spring and Autumn Period, forcing the powerful Chu State to bow its head and accept The dominance of Qi State.

Comparing the hegemony process between Qi Chu and the United States and the Soviet Union, one can’t help but wonder whether the United States’ economic war thinking was influenced by Guan Zhong, and even applied it to the point where the master was better than the master, which can be called a master.

Let’s start from the experience of these two economic wars and compare who is smarter.

During the Spring and Autumn Period, the Chu State owned vast land in the Yangtze and Han River basins in southern China. Its people were martial and aggressive, and its military power was strong, which gave Duke Huan of Qi a headache.

He once complained to Guan Zhong, "The state of Chu is a powerful state in Shandong, and its people are very familiar with the skills of fighting. I want to send troops to attack it, but I am afraid that I will not be able to defeat it. What should I do?"

The Soviet Union in the 1970s was also a superpower that frightened all countries in the world, including the United States. At that time, the United States was entangled in the mud of the Vietnam War, and its national power was greatly reduced.

It was even forced to give up the mechanism of linking the US dollar to gold since the Bretton Woods system. At that time, the Soviet Union not only surpassed the United States in nuclear weapons reserves, but also had more than 60,000 tanks on the ground ready to attack at any time. Flooding the European continent.

This made the use of military means to attack the Soviet Union not a possible option at all. I think President Nixon of the United States at that time must have sighed like Duke Huan of Qi: What should we do with such a red monster?

Guan Zhong said this to Duke Huan of Qi: There are three countries rich in resources in the world, and our country of Qi is one of them. Among them, Chu produces gold, Qi’s Quzhan and Yan’s Liaodong. salt.

So Guan Zhong ordered the people to start cooking salt in October, and by the first month of the next year, they had accumulated 36,000 salt. In the spring, it was forbidden to cook salt again, and the price of salt increased tenfold.

Guan Zhong sold salt to inland salt-deficient countries and obtained more than 11,000 kilograms of gold. He also ordered envoys to use gold for gifts and donations, so the value of the gold hoarded became even more expensive. Duke Huan gained a large amount of economic chips.

Back in modern times, the United States made huge war fortunes in World War II. Through the Bretton Woods system, it established the standard of equal status between the U.S. dollar and gold, and became the settlement currency for world trade.

However, with the huge expenditures of the Vietnam War, President Nixon was finally forced to abandon the fixed exchange rate of 35 US dollars for one ounce of gold, and the value of the US dollar plummeted and was in danger.

At this critical juncture, Secretary of State Kissinger, the "Guan Zhong" of the United States, visited various countries in the Middle East and signed a secret agreement with Saudi Arabia in 1974, allowing the world's largest oil-producing country to agree to use U.S. dollars as currency. The only pricing tool for oil.

The U.S. dollar, backed by the industrial blood of oil, immediately regained its vitality and continued to maintain its status as a hard currency in world trade. The United States, which controls the U.S. dollar money printing machine, also tightly grasped a good card. In the palm of your hand.

After possessing huge economic power, Guan Zhong made a puzzled suggestion to Qi Huan Gong regarding the issue of Chu: Please buy deer at a high price. At that time, Chu State, which had a large amount of undeveloped forests, was the main source of deer.

As a result, a large number of Qi merchants entered the Chu State and raised the price of a deer from two copper coins to three, and soon to five, and finally to the astronomical price of forty copper coins per deer. .

The kings and ministers of Chu State were overjoyed in the palace: Money is a good thing that people like, is stored by the state, and is rewarded by the king, but deer is a harmful beast that needs to be driven away from the crop fields, so the people of Chu State abandoned their fields. To catch deer for sale.

Guan Zhong further lured Chu merchants to purchase wild deer and accumulate money. Chu State obtained a large amount of wealth without even taxing farmers, while Qi State quietly hoarded a large amount of grain.

In the early 1970s, due to the oil crisis caused by the outbreak of the Middle East war, international oil prices soared more than ten times, and oil was pegged to the US dollar.

As the world's major oil-producing country, the Soviet Union immediately received huge US dollar income. The Soviet Union could use this hard currency to buy a large amount of food on the international market, which suddenly solved the headache that had previously caused its leaders. There are endless agricultural problems caused by population growth.

The urgency of the Soviet Union’s need to solve the imbalanced development of light and heavy industries and the reform of agricultural production that had existed since the founding of the country was thus put on hold.

The Soviet leaders, who were carried away, began to import large quantities of various machinery that could also be produced in the country, and unrealistically carried out assistance to satellite countries, as if the price of oil was not dollars but rubles.

Guan Zhong waited until Chu State accumulated a large amount of copper coins and immediately closed trade with Chu State. Chu State could not buy grain, so he had to plant grain again, but the grain could not grow in three months, and the price was crazy. It rose to four hundred copper coins.

Guan Zhong sent people to transport grain to the border. Four-tenths of the Chu people surrendered to Qi. By the third year, the powerful Chu State had to surrender to Qi.

The Soviet leadership, which was delayed by oil revenue, was so confused that it finally ordered the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The United States immediately seized the opportunity and took a multi-pronged approach: on the one hand, it vigorously supported the Afghan anti-Soviet resistance movement, and on the other hand, it faced the Soviet Union The technical blockade severely damaged Soviet oil production capacity.

At the same time, in the mid-1980s, when the war was most critical, they conspired with Saudi Arabia to suppress oil prices, causing them to plummet by 60%. Coupled with natural and man-made disasters such as the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, the Soviet Union immediately fell into a serious economic crisis.

At this time, the United States finally took action, using US dollar loans to lure the Soviet Union into implementing "Western-style reforms" step by step, and eventually fell into the abyss of disintegration.

Looking at it this way, are the U.S. economic warfare methods different from or even superior to Guan Zhong’s strategy?

Of course, food security is the lifeline of a country at any time. We must pay attention to agricultural production. After all, our ancestors have reminded us of this poisonous scheme in the United States thousands of years ago! Who else in the world is wiser than the Chinese people.

Text/Lin Bonan