Why China will deliberately avoid giving the U.S. a Pearl Harbor moment | Dean Cheng

Defense Disrupted · Jun 16, 2026 · 44m

Every war the U.S. has fought since Korea, no American servicemember has had to wonder if they were being watched from space. Dean Cheng, one of fewer than two dozen analysts outside the U.S. government who reads Chinese primary sources on the PLA space program, tells Ian that era ends in any conflict with China. In some areas, his read is that China may already be ahead.

He lays out why the structural picture makes that hard to reverse: two Chinese state-owned enterprises of roughly 100,000 people each with no profit requirement, a commercial sector primed through Five-Year Plan priority…