As a classic military text in China, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War is bestowed with multiple translations which brought about a great impact on western military culture. However, there has been little research on the reconstruction of cultural identity through paratexts in these translations. To address such an issue, the present paper conducts a descriptive case study on Giles’ English translation of The Art of War. It firstly proposes a framework on basis of the theoretical discussions of cultural identity and paratexts in translation. The data in this study is drawn from a self-built parallel corpus. It finds out that three strategies, namely supplementation, comparison and evaluation, are used in rich paratexts to reconstruct a respectable Chinese military culture in partnership with the core text. The fact that Giles’ translation has been well-received in western culture shows that his non-ethnocentric approach to cultural identity reconstruction is effective. Our study suggests that, in translation, non-ethnocentrism is helpful in accomplishing the goal of successful cross-cultural communication and paratexts can provide an effective platform for the reconstruction of a desired cultural identity.