A Conversation with Mr. Richard D. Fisher, "China's Military Modernization"

Mr. Rick Fisher is Senior Fellow, International Assessment and Strategy Center. His career includes study at Georgetown University and Eisenhower College, serving as Asian Studies Director at the Heritage Foundation, US China Security & Economic Review Commission, Editor of the Jamestown Foundation’s China Brief and as President of Pacific Strategies, Inc. During this conversation, Mr. Fisher reviews his book, China’s Military Modernization: Building for Regional and Global Reach. 

China's rise to global economic and strategic eminence has the potential for achieving pre-eminence in the greater-Asian region. With this rise, his book offers essential understanding of the military-strategic basis and trajectory of a rising China. It also provides background on current and future issues concerning China's rising strategic-military influence.

China is now exerting military and strategic pressure on Japan, the Korean Peninsula, India, the South China Sea, the Taiwan Strait, Central Asia, Africa and Latin America. Is conflict a foregone conclusion, as indicated by China's increasing participation in many benign international organizations? Will China's leadership pursue its interests as it sees them, not in keeping with those of the United States and the otherwise free world? 

Mr. Fisher also discusses how China's People's Liberation Army (PLA) remains critical to the existence of the Chinese Communist government. While China has both internal and external constraints on its rise to global eminence, the far-reaching strategic agenda of the Chinese government is clear and present.