Fiona Cunningham joined Evan Medeiros to discuss her forthcoming book, Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security (2025). Among states facing the dilemma of fighting limited wars, only China has given information-age weapons such a prominent role. China has chosen to rely on offensive cyber operations, counterspace capabilities, and precision conventional missiles to coerce its adversaries, to substitute for relying more on its nuclear weapons. Fiona Cunningham shared how her book examines this distinctive aspect of China’s post–Cold War deterrence strategy, developing an original theory of “strategic substitution.” Drawing on hundreds of original Chinese-language sources and interviews with security experts in China, Cunningham’s research provides a rare and candid glimpse from Beijing into the information-age technologies that are reshaping how states gain leverage in the twenty-first century.
This event was co-sponsored by Georgetown University's Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues and Asian Studies Program in the School of Foreign Service.
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Fiona Cunningham is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania who studies technology and conflict in East Asia. Her research focuses on how countries leverage different military capabilities and information-age technologies for coercion in the nuclear age, particularly with respect to China.
Evan Medeiros (moderator) is the Penner Family Chair in Asian Studies at the School of Foreign Service and a senior fellow with the Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues at Georgetown University. Medeiros has in-depth experience in U.S. policy toward the Asia-Pacific from his time on the National Security Council as director for China, Taiwan and Mongolia, and then as special assistant to the president and senior director for Asia under President Barack Obama.