Vol. 16: Sort Friends from Foes Before You Act: What "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society" Says About the First Step

In the winter of the twelfth year of the Jian'an era (207 AD), Liu Bei walked into the thatched hut at Longzhong for the third time.

He was forty-six that year and had spent most of his life living under other men's roofs. He had served Gongsun Zan, Tao Qian, Cao Cao, and Yuan Shao, and now he was serving Liu Biao, garrisoned in the small town of Xinye, guarding the northern gate of Jing Province for someone else. He had Guan Yu and Zhang Fei and an army that was far from weak, yet after more than twenty years of struggle, he didn't hold a single patch of land of his own.

Across from him sat Zhuge Liang, twenty-seven years old, with no rank, no office, and not one day of commanding troops behind him.

Liu Bei asked: The realm is in chaos. What should I do?

A question like that usually gets one of two answers.

The first is flattery: General, your virtue is known everywhere, the people are behind you, you are bound to succeed.

The second is a pitch: give me so many men, and I'll take such-and-such a city for you first. Zhuge Liang gave neither.

He didn't rush to take a position or offer a plan. Instead, he calmly laid out the facts:

Cao Cao now commands a host of a million and holds the emperor hostage to issue orders to the lords. He truly cannot be challenged head-on.

First, Cao Cao. You can't beat him. This isn't talking up the enemy. It's doing the math: he has the most soldiers, the most territory, the emperor in his hands, and with the emperor, legitimacy. Fight an opponent like that head-on and you'll lose every time. He cannot be challenged head-on.

Sun Quan holds the land east of the Yangtze, now in its third generation. His realm is protected by natural barriers, his people are loyal, and able men serve him. He can be an ally, but he must not be a target.

Next, Sun Quan. His family has ruled the east for three generations, the roots run deep, the Yangtze guards his borders, the people support him, and capable men are willing to fight for him. A power like that can be brought in as a partner, but you shouldn't have designs on it. "He can be an ally, but he must not be a target" means: he can be your friend, but your friend's rice bowl is not yours to take.

So what can you take?

Jing Province and Yi Province. Jing has the Han River to the north, reaches toward the southern sea, connects to Wu in the east and to Shu in the west. It's a place made for war, and its ruler can't hold it. Yi has a thousand miles of fertile land and is called the Land of Abundance, but its ruler, Liu Zhang, is weak and can't manage it. Good land, bad rulers. That gap is where the opportunity hides.

Only after all three cards were on the table did he give the conclusion: ally with Sun Quan against Cao Cao, take Jing and Yi in the west, keep good relations with Sun Quan abroad, govern well at home, and when the realm shifts, march out on two fronts.

Liu Bei's path over the next twenty years: take Jing Province, enter Yi Province, proclaim himself King of Hanzhong.

He followed that map almost step by step.

Let's look at how Zhuge Liang handled the question.

Liu Bei asked "what should I do," and Zhuge Liang answered "first, see clearly." He didn't open with a plan. He first sorted every power in the realm by where it stood, into three piles: the one you can't touch, the one you should team up with, and the one you can take. Once those three piles were sorted, nobody needed to tell Liu Bei what to do. The answer surfaced on its own.

When I first read the Longzhong Plan years ago, all I took from it was brilliance. Zhuge Liang seemed to see the future like some kind of immortal. Later, reading the Selected Works of Mao Zedong, I came to "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society" and finally understood why the move felt familiar: about a hundred years ago, in 1925, Mao Zedong did exactly the same thing.

Another Map, 1925

In 1925 the revolution in China was already underway, but the revolutionaries hadn't settled one basic question: who, exactly, was this revolution going to rely on?

There were two main camps. One, represented by Chen Duxiu, had its eyes on the bourgeoisie and the Kuomintang, believed they would drive the revolution, and didn't think much of workers and peasants. The other emphasized the labor movement but felt it wasn't strong enough on its own, and didn't know where the peasants fit in. The two camps looked like opposites, but they shared the same flaw: neither had taken Chinese society apart layer by layer. Both were choosing teammates from a vague overall impression.

Mao didn't rush to pick a side either.

He wrote a short essay, and its opening line pinned down the question:

Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is a question of the first importance for the revolution.

What he did next was exactly what Zhuge Liang did in the thatched hut: take the whole board apart first.

Landlords and compradors lived off imperialism and would be the first to lose if revolution came, so they opposed it firmly. The national bourgeoisie was squeezed by imperialism and wanted to resist, but when it came to action, they feared the revolution would turn on them too, so they wavered. The petty bourgeoisie was the largest group, split into three layers: those with money to spare were afraid of trouble, those just getting by stayed neutral, and those whose lives got harder every year wanted change more every day. Below them were the semi-proletariat and the proletariat, who owned nothing, suffered the most, and acted the most decisively.

Group	Situation	Attitude to revolution	Where they stand
Landlords, compradors	Dependent on imperialism, at the very top	Firmly opposed	No need to persuade
National bourgeoisie	Squeezed from two sides, torn between gain and loss	Wavering	Win over the left, watch the right
Petty bourgeoisie	The largest group, mostly on a downward slide	From indifferent to longing for change	Ally with
Semi-proletariat, proletariat	Own nothing, the most oppressed	The most determined	Rely on

Take it apart, put it back together, and once again the answer surfaces on its own.

Who to rely on, who to ally with, who to fight. Sort the three piles, and the strategy appears.

Two people, more than seventeen hundred years apart, both facing the question "what now?", both made the same move: don't act yet. First, get clear on where everyone stands.

Draw the Map First, Then Act

Put the Longzhong Plan next to Mao's essay and a shared framework appears.

Before you act, sort everyone into three piles by where their interests lie: who you can rely on, who you should ally with, and who you don't need to persuade.

Notice the wording of the third pile. It's "who you don't need to persuade," not "who you need to fight." That's because what we deal with today is rarely life or death, but someone's interests will always take a hit. The people who lose out won't change their minds because you made a nice argument. Their position isn't a misunderstanding. It's the result of where they stand.

What makes this framework valuable is that our instincts run in exactly the opposite order.

When we want to push something through, our first reaction is usually one of two things. Either we go talk to whoever agrees with us most, have a great conversation, and think we're halfway there. Or we gather everyone in one room, explain the whole case from start to finish, and hope that once it's clear, everyone will come around. But people in different positions hear completely different things in the same speech.

The people who gain hear an opportunity. The people unaffected hear a hassle. The people who lose hear a threat. There's one argument and three piles of listeners.

If you don't sort first, you end up in a very familiar situation: you spend the most words, the most meetings, and the most explaining on the third pile, and the thing still won't move. Not because the idea is wrong, but because your effort went to the wrong place.

Sometimes the Map Gets Torn Up

Liu Bei held on to the Longzhong map for years, right up until Guan Yu was killed by Wu.

In 221 AD, just three months after declaring himself emperor in Chengdu, Liu Bei decided to throw the whole state into a campaign east against Sun Quan. Zhao Yun tried to stop him: the real enemy of the state was Cao Cao, not Sun Quan, and once Wei was destroyed, Wu would submit on its own.¹ Zhuge Liang didn't support the campaign either. But this time Liu Bei wouldn't listen to anyone.

It had always been clear: Sun Quan could be an ally but must not be a target, let alone the target of an all-in war. Liu Bei understood that better than anyone. He was the one who visited the thatched hut three times to get that map. But when emotions take over, even the clearest map can't hold a person back.

We all know what came next. At Yiling, a single fire burned the line of camps to the ground and destroyed most of Shu Han's best troops. The next year Liu Bei died of illness at Baidi, leaving his son Liu Shan and everything he had built to Zhuge Liang. Zhuge Liang gave the rest of his life to the state, and much of that was spent paying off the debt of that one battle.

Once you've sorted friend from foe, don't let your emotions overturn the verdict. It's easy to say. Liu Bei's ending proved how hard it is.

The Warring States period has a similar story.

Before Fan Ju met King Zhao of Qin, Qin's armies were running all over the map, attacking Qi one day and Chu the next. Plenty of fighting, very little to show for it. Fan Ju offered just one direction: befriend the distant, attack the near. Keep faraway Qi and Chu quiet, and swallow neighboring Han and Wei bite by bite. "Every inch you gain is Your Majesty's inch; every foot you gain is Your Majesty's foot."²

From then on, every battle Qin fought was another brick toward unification. Same state, same army, same kinds of battles, but once friend and foe were sorted, the results were completely different.

Bringing It Home

In everyday life today, using this is actually pretty simple.

When you want to push something forward, whether it's a proposal, a change, a partnership, or even a big decision at home, don't start by explaining how great it is. First, sort the people involved into three piles in your head.

Who benefits? That pile is who you rely on, and they're the first people to bring together. Get them moving first and you have a base. When you hit resistance later, you won't be carrying it alone.

Who loses nothing? That pile is who you ally with. What they're missing isn't a reason to object. It's a reason to take part. Give them a role, a small benefit, or even just a heads-up, and they may go from watching to lending a hand.

Who loses? That pile you don't need to persuade.

Not needing to persuade them doesn't mean making enemies of them. It means you stop spending energy on the idea that "once I explain it clearly, they'll agree." With this pile, the real questions are different: can their loss be reduced, can it be compensated, and if neither works, can you go around it?

Once you've sorted the three piles, you'll find that a lot of what you thought were people problems are really position problems, and a lot of what you thought were communication problems are really order problems. First bring together the people you can rely on, then win over the people you can ally with, and only then deal with the people who lose. Get the order right and things still won't be perfectly smooth, but your effort won't go to waste.

You don't need a big occasion to use this kind of sorting, either. Before you bring a proposal to a meeting, before you hand out tasks, even before you say something out loud, you can run through it first: which pile is this meant for, and which side will that pile take when they hear it? Do it often enough and sorting stops being something you do on purpose and becomes the way you see things.

Since then, whenever I look at something that won't move, mine or someone else's, I usually see the same shadow. It's not that the idea is wrong. It's that all the effort keeps going to the third pile, while the first pile was never seriously brought together at all.

Friends and foes aren't sorted by feelings. They're sorted by position. Once the positions are clear, you know where to put your effort.

Footnotes

1. Zhao Yun's objection to the eastern campaign is recorded in Pei Songzhi's annotations to the Records of the Three Kingdoms, Biography of Zhao Yun, quoting the Unofficial Biography of Zhao Yun: "The enemy of the state is Cao Cao, not Sun Quan. Destroy Wei first, and Wu will submit on its own." ↩

2. "Befriend the distant, attack the near" comes from the Strategies of the Warring States, Strategies of Qin III: "Your Majesty would do better to befriend the distant and attack the near. Every inch you gain is Your Majesty's inch; every foot you gain is Your Majesty's foot." ↩