Crossing The Strait? PLA Modernization And Taiwan

Wednesday, April 6, 2022
Hoover Institution, Stanford University

On behalf of Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific Region, and its National Security Task Force the Hoover Institution invites you to Crossing the Strait? PLA Modernization and Taiwan on Wednesday, April 6, 2022 from 11:30 am - 12:30 pm PT.

Drawing upon the new book Crossing the Strait: China’s Military Prepares for War with Taiwan, Dr. Saunders will discuss China’s available military options, how organizational reforms and new capabilities have improved the PLA’s ability to execute these options, the current cross-strait military balance, the challenges China would face in trying to resolve the Taiwan issue by force, and how Beijing weighs military, economic, and political factors in its evolving Taiwan policy calculus. His presentation will draw upon extensive open-source analysis of PLA efforts to build the necessary power projection capabilities and discuss how lessons learned from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may affect thinking in China, Taiwan, and the United States.

Featuring Phillip C. Saunders Director, Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs National Defense University, followed by conversation with Kharis Templeman, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution.

SPEAKER BIOS
Kharis Templeman is a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and part of the Project on Taiwan in the Indo-Pacific. Templeman is a political scientist (Ph.D. 2012, Michigan) with research interests in Taiwan politics, democratization, elections and election management, party system development, dominant party systems, and politics and security issues in Pacific Asia, among other topics.

Dr. Phillip C. Saunders is the Director of the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs at National Defense University’s Institute for National Strategic Studies, where he has worked since 2004. He previously worked at the Monterey Institute of International Studies and served as an officer in the United States Air Force. Dr. Saunders is co-author of The Paradox of Power: Sino-American Strategic Restraint in an Era of Vulnerability and has edited nine books on Asian security issues, including The PLA Beyond Borders: Chinese Military Operations in Regional and Global Context (2021), Chairman Xi Remakes the PLA: Assessing Chinese Military Reforms (2019) and PLA Influence on China’s National Security Policymaking (2015).