China’s Emergence as a Defense Technological Power: How Innovative?
Tai Ming Cheung

June 8, 2016

From fighter aircraft to high-performance computers, China has been making concerted advances in the development of its defense science, technology, and innovation capabilities since the beginning of the 21st Century. What explains this progress? How innovative is this performance? Can China catch up to the global frontier and if so by when? What are the implications for the U.S.? Tai Ming Cheung will offer key insights from a multi-year research project that he leads examining China’s rise as a global innovation power funded by the U.S. Defense Department.

Tai Ming Cheung is director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) located at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla. He leads the institute's Study of Innovation and Technology in China (SITC) project that examines China's efforts to become a world-class science and technology power. Dr. Cheung is also an associate professor at the School of Global Policy and Strategy at UC San Diego, where he teaches courses on Chinese foreign and defense policy and Chinese security and technology policy. Dr. Cheung is a long-time analyst of Chinese and East Asian defense and national security affairs, especially defense economic, industrial and science and technological issues. He is the author of Fortifying China: The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy (Cornell University Press, 2009), editor of Forging China's Military Might: A New Framework for Assessing Innovation (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), and co-editor of China and Cybersecurity (Oxford University Press, 2015). He was based in Northeast Asia (Hong Kong, China, and Japan) from the mid-1980s to 2002 covering political, economic, and strategic developments in Greater China and East Asia as a journalist for the Far Eastern Economic Review from 1988-1993 and subsequently as a political and business risk consultant for a number of companies, including PricewaterhouseCoopers.