While Taiwan is stepping up calls for the United States to sell the island new F-16 jets and diesel submarines, there are signs that the Taiwanese military has been shoring up the island’s indigenously developed military capabilities. Recent pronouncements by a prominent Taiwanese legislator from... MORE

In May 2010 a team of 15 Chinese researchers from Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Hefei National Laboratory for Physical Sciences, a government-directed research center, published a research paper announcing a successful demonstration of “quantum teleportation” (liangzi yinxing chuan) over 16 kilometers of free... MORE

The Caspian region is becoming enmeshed in a web of overlapping political, military, trade and energy interests of countries extending from Asia, to the Middle East, to Russia, to Europe. Given the rising instability of Middle East energy supplies, the Caspian basin has emerged in... MORE

A few weeks before the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) released its 2010 report to Congress on “Military and Security Developments Involving the People’s Republic of China,” a Taiwanese military intelligence assessment reportedly asserted that the People's Liberation Army (PLA) "regular amphibious abilities have ...... MORE

An intriguing divergence of views has been exposed within China’s foreign-policy establishment on how to handle the country’s worsening ties with the United States that may highlight a growing dissonance between China’s civilian and military establishments. Sino-American relations have taken a confrontational turn since Washington... MORE

On August 9, China launched the remote sensing satellite Yaogan-10 (military designation: Jianbing) into orbit from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center. Situated in the northwest of Shanxi Province, the site is a space and defense launch facility reportedly used for testing the Chinese military’s intercontinental... MORE

As China becomes visibly more aggressive, tensions in Asia are visible, and Russian foreign policy changes to emphasize its economic relations with advanced countries who will sell it technology; it would make sense that Moscow and Tokyo should be drawing closer to each other. Yet,... MORE

A new and potentially potent type of grievance has raised its head in China. Linguistic grievance, which is to say anger over the central government’s relentless promotion of Putonghua (or Mandarin) at the expense of older and regional tongues (namely Cantonese), has taken center-stage in... MORE

China’s People’s Liberation Army Navy (PLAN) forces took to the East China Sea in late June for live-fire maneuvers. These naval exercises were widely interpreted as expressions of preemptive Chinese displeasure over U.S.-South Korean exercises slated for the Yellow Sea. Washington dispatched the nuclear-powered aircraft... MORE

On July 19, Central Military Commission (CMC) Chairman Hu Jintao promoted 11 military officers to three stars (general/admiral), bringing the total since 1988 to 129 officers (Xinhua News Agency, July 27) [1]. Based on previous patterns, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) will most likely promote... MORE