The closing stratagem of the received text, 'when all else fails, retreat', rests on the proverb recorded in the Book of Southern Qi (537) regarding Wang Jingze. The chapter frames flight not as cowardice but as preservation of force: Sun Tzu's own Art of War, chapter 7, ranks the management of retreat and avoidance among a general's core skills.
Western readers often file the thirty-sixth stratagem under surrender or quitting, missing that the text requires it only when defeat is certain and survival keeps the game alive. It is a strategy of return, not of disappearance.
In the stratagem's logic, the player who can leave sets the terms of every engagement, because no position is a cage. Hirschman's Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (1970) is the modern formalization: exit is a form of power that needs no confrontation.
If withdrawal is the master stratagem, how many of your fights are just unwillingness to exit?