Tai Ming Cheung

Tai Ming Cheung

The speaker at the June 2013 CCST Council meeting was Tai Ming Cheung, director of the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation (IGCC) located at the University of California, San Diego in La Jolla. He also leads the institute’s Study of Technology and Innovation (SITC) project. A key component of SITC is a U.S. Defense Department Minerva Initiative project on “The Evolving Relationship Between Technology and National Security in China.” This five-year research and training program examines China’s efforts to become a world-class science and technology power.

His responsibilities include managing the institute’s track two program, the Northeast Asia Cooperation Dialogue, which brings together senior foreign ministry and defense officials as well as academics from the United States, China, Japan, South Korea, North Korea, and Russia for informed discussions on regional security issues.

Dr. Cheung is also an associate professor in residence at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies (IR/PS) at UC San Diego, where he teaches courses on Asian security and Chinese security and technology.

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. His latest book, Fortifying China: The Struggle to Build a Modern Defense Economy, was published by Cornell University Press in 2009. The book examines the economic, commercial and technological foundations of China’s long-term defense modernization that examines the development of the defense industrial complex, the role and prospects for civilian-military integration, and the military dimensions of science and technology policies.

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 PricewaterhouseCooper.