Fortifying China explores the titanic struggle to turn China into an aspiring world-class military technological power. The defense economy is leveraging the country's vibrant civilian economy and gaining access to foreign sources of technology and know-how. Drawing on extensive Chinese-language sources, Tai Ming Cheung explains that this transformation has two key dimensions. The defense economy is being reengineered to break down bureaucratic barriers and reduce the role of the state, fostering a more competitive and entrepreneurial culture to facilitate the rapid diffusion and absorption of technology and knowledge. At the same time, the civilian and defense economies are being integrated to form a dual-use technological and industrial base. In Cheung's view, the Chinese authorities believe this strategy will play a key role in supporting long-term defense modernization. For China's neighbors and the United States, understanding China's technological, industrial, and military capabilities is critical to the formulation of economic and security policies. Fortifying China provides crucial insight into the impact of China's dual-use technology strategy. Cheung's "systems of innovation" framework considers the structure, dynamics, and performance of the defense economy from a systems-level perspective.

Fortifying China explores the titanic struggle to turn China into an aspiring world-class military technological power. The defense economy is leveraging the country's vibrant civilian economy and gaining access to foreign sources of technology and know-how. Drawing on extensive Chinese-language sources, Tai Ming Cheung explains that this transformation has two key dimensions. The defense economy is being reengineered to break down bureaucratic barriers and reduce the role of the state, fostering a more competitive and entrepreneurial culture to facilitate the rapid diffusion and absorption of technology and knowledge. At the same time, the civilian and defense economies are being integrated to form a dual-use technological and industrial base. In Cheung's view, the Chinese authorities believe this strategy will play a key role in supporting long-term defense modernization. For China's neighbors and the United States, understanding China's technological, industrial, and military capabilities is critical to the formulation of economic and security policies. Fortifying China provides crucial insight into the impact of China's dual-use technology strategy. Cheung's "systems of innovation" framework considers the structure, dynamics, and performance of the defense economy from a systems-level perspective.

“His collection of nine essays offers a comprehensive and insightful assessment of the Chinese defense science and technology (S&T).” —Pacific Affairs Among the most important issues in international security today are the nature and the global implications of China’s emergence as a world-class defense technology power. Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, the Chinese defense industry has reinvented itself by emphasizing technological innovation and technology. This reinvention and its potential effects, both positive and negative, are attracting global scrutiny. Drawing insights from a range of disciplines, including history, social science, business, and strategic studies, Tai Ming Cheung and the contributors to Forging China’s Military Might develop an analytical framework to evaluate the nature, dimensions, and spectrum of Chinese innovation in the military and broader defense spheres. Forging China’s Military Might provides an overview of the current state of the Chinese defense industry and then focuses on subjects critical to understanding short- and long-term developments, including the relationship among defense contractors, regulators, and end-users; civil-military integration; China’s defense innovation system; and China’s place in the global defense economy. Case studies look in detail at the Chinese space and missile industry. “Constitutes high-quality, cutting-edge research on China’s defense industries. It should enjoy broad appeal—among academics, policy makers, security analysts, and business people in countries around the world.” —Andrew Scobell, RAND Corporation “Forging China’s Military Might belongs in any political science shelf interested in China’s issues and international security and considers the nature of China’s emergence as a world power.” —Midwest Book Review

In Innovate to Dominate, Tai Ming Cheung offers insight into why, how, and whether China will overtake the United States to become the world's preeminent technological and security power. This examination of the means and ends of China's quest for techno-security supremacy is required reading for anyone looking for clues as to the long-term direction of the global order. The techno-security domain, Cheung argues, is where national security, innovation, and economic development converge, and it has become the center of power and prosperity in the twenty-first century. China's paramount leader Xi Jinping recognizes that effectively harnessing the complex interactions among security, innovation, and development is essential in enabling China to compete for global dominance. Cheung offers a richly detailed account of how China is building a potent techno-security state. In Innovate to Dominate he takes readers from the strategic vision guiding this transformation to the nuts-and-bolts of policy implementation. The state-led top-down mobilizational model that China is pursuing has been a winning formula so far, but the sternest test is ahead as China begins to compete head-to-head with the United States and aims to surpass its archrival by mid-century if not sooner. Innovate to Dominate is a timely and analytically rigorous examination of the key strategies guiding China's transformation of its capabilities in the national, technological, military, and security spheres and how this is taking place. Cheung authoritatively addresses the burning questions being asked in capitals around the world: Can China become the dominant global techno-security power? And if so, when?

A transnational approach to understanding and analyzing knowledge circulation. The contributors to this collection focus on what happens to knowledge and know-how at national borders. Rather than treating it as flowing like currents across them, or diffusing out from center to periphery, they stress the human intervention that shapes how knowledge is processed, mobilized, and repurposed in transnational transactions to serve diverse interests, constraints, and environments. The chapters consider both what knowledge travels and how it travels across borders of varying permeability that impede or facilitate its movement. They look closely at a variety of platforms and objects of knowledge, from tangible commodities—like hybrid wheat seeds, penicillin, Robusta coffee, naval weaponry, seed banks, satellites and high-performance computers—to the more conceptual apparatuses of plant phenotype data and statistics. Moreover, this volume decenters the Global North, tracking how knowledge moves along multiple paths across the borders of Mexico, India, Portugal, Guinea-Bissau, the Soviet Union, China, Angola, Palestine and the West Bank, as well as the United States and the United Kingdom. An important new work of transnational history, this collection recasts the way we understand and analyze knowledge circulation.

China is flexing its growing military and strategic clout in the pursuit of broadening national security interests. At the same time, the country’s economic and technology policies have also become more nationalistic, state-centered, and ambitious. China’s defense economy has set its sights on catching up with the West by the beginning of the 2020s and is making steady progress in building up its innovation capabilities, although this is presently in the form of incremental and sustaining types of activities. More high-end, disruptive forms of innovation that would lead to major breakthroughs are likely to be beyond China’s reach in the near-to medium term. This volume provides a wide-ranging and detailed assessment of the present state of the Chinese defense economy at a time of rapid change and accelerating advancement in its innovation capabilities and performance. This collection of articles has three main goals: (1) to locate China’s defense innovation dynamics within broader historical, technological and methodological frameworks of analysis; (2) to assess the performance of the Chinese defense economy’s six principal subsectors; and (3) to compare China’s approach to defense industrialization with major counterparts in the Asia-Pacific region. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Strategic Studies.

"Chronicles the diverse aspects of this transition since the late-1990s. It is comprehensive in scope and draws upon both primary Chinese sources and secondary Western analyses written by the world's leading experts on contemporary China ... covers the full range of China's internal and external developments."--From publisher description.