and so it's been wonderful for us here in the russian and eurasian program to paul schwartz onboard asonresident associate to work on specifically the nuts and bolts of sino-russian military cooperation, and the first fruits of pulsed affiliation with us, first concrete proof of it is this report here. and so i hope you have a chance to read it and i look forward to the discussion we're going to have here today. i think what we are going to do is we will have paul discuss the report for about 15 to 20 minutes, go through some of the data and some of the conclusions, and then we will have a little discussion up here. in addition to paul we have my colleague thomas karako is a senior fellow at the international 60 program and director of the missile defense project here, and then zack cooper who is a fellow with the japan chair and an expert on asian security issues. tom is going to talk about some of the political aspects, particularly as it affects the united states, and then cycle give all the more of a regional perspective, how asia as a whole use of sino-russian military cooperation

i'm going to turn the floor over to paul schwartz. paul: thanks a lot. in 1996 taiwan's current president was up for reelection. he had previously made state and's indicating he favored greater independence for taiwan, statements that had greatly disturbed china's leaders, fearing that china may declare outright independence. they needed to send a strong signal that taiwan was heading down a dangerous path. they began discussing a series of live fire missiles -- live fire missile exercises. two carrier task forces were dispatched to the region. lacking the means to effectively counter it, china's leaders were forced to back down to accept a humiliating defeat. it was no accident a few short months later they entered their first contract. designedremedy being specifically to attack and destroy u.s. aircraft carriers. nor would this proved to be a one-time event. russiane cold war defense assistance has been crucial to the development of china's surface and anti-surface warfare capabilities. recently over the last several years in a few cases, russian defe