a shi strategy boils down to acquiring positional advantage and superiority for an easier, if not assured, victorious fight to follow. Shi is always focused more on the future than the current moment, an emphasis on “upstream,” intermediate aims, or intermediate foci within the field, becoming means, and by which the ultimate ends can be more readily achieved. The path to victory, therefore, is reduced to the essential element of adhering to shi, an intertemporal advantage, instead of the headlong rush into conflict, an approach known as li.
