>plenty of Chinese statecraft was contemporary or earlier than Plato/Artistotle Of course, but the West didn't have access to them until the early modern perio

>plenty of Chinese statecraft was contemporary or earlier than Plato/Artistotle Of course, but the West didn't have access to them until the early modern period. We're not discussing which came first, we're discussing influence. >Why isn't that the most common thing we should encounter when reading about political theory? This is what I meant by you being all over the place. The answer to this question really depends on the topic. If it's a general overview of political thought across time, it's true that Western works on the topic shamefully tend to ignore non-Western sources. If it's an overview of Western political thought, it makes sense to start with the sources of Western political thought and later discuss how the eventual encounters with Chinese thought changed things.