Around 2019 signs first emerged that China had embarked on its most significant nuclear modernization program since it became a nuclear power in 1964, but Western scholars disagree on China’s motivations for doing so. This paper offers a framework to explain major changes in China’s nuclear policy that highlights the role of domestic politics in those choices. I argue that China’s recent nuclear modernization required the formation of a consensus among domestic actors who influenced nuclear decision making. Each of these actors supported the modernization for different reasons. Relying on the first interviews with experts in China since the COVID-19 pandemic as well as original Chinese-language documents, the paper identifies four motivations for the modernization: China’s arsenal survivability, the political leverage that a larger arsenal can provide, avoiding perceived mistakes of Soviet nuclear policy, and influencing conventional war outcomes. It identifies proponents for each of these arguments among key groups involved in China’s nuclear decision-making: nuclear laboratories and experts, national security generalists who lack specialist nuclear expertise, the top leader, and the missile force. This domestic political lens also helps to explain the lack of change in China’s nuclear policy in the past.

About the speaker

Fiona Cunningham is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests lie at the intersection of technology and international security, with a focus on China. Fiona’s first book, Under the Nuclear Shadow: China’s Information-Age Weapons in International Security (Princeton University Press, 2025) won the Peter Katzenstein Book Prize and Edgar S. Furniss Book Award. The book examines China’s distinctive approach to the dilemma of coercing an adversary under the shadow of nuclear war, which relies on information-age weapons (offensive cyber operations, counterspace capabilities and precision conventional missiles) as substitutes for nuclear threats. Her articles on nuclear strategy, cybersecurity, escalation dynamics, international law, and U.S.-China relations have appeared in International Security, Security Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, and Texas National Security Review. Fiona has held fellowships at the Renmin University of China in Beijing, Harvard University, Stanford University, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and Yale University. She has nonresident affiliations with the MIT Security Studies Program, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and the ANU National Security College. She received her PhD in political science from MIT.

Host
Reppy Institute for Peace and Conflict Studies, part of the Einaudi Center for International Studies