Michael D. Swaine is a senior research fellow in the Quincy Institute’s East Asia Program and is one of the most prominent American scholars of Chinese security studies. At the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, he worked for nearly twenty years as a senior fellow specializing in Chinese defense and foreign policy, U.S.-China relations, and East Asian international relations. Before that, Swaine served as a senior policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.

Swaine has authored and edited more than a dozen books and monographs and many articles, papers and opinion pieces, including Interpreting China’s Grand Strategy, Past, Present, and Future, with Ashley Tellis, (2000); Managing Sino-American Crises: Case Studies and Analysis, with Zhang Tuosheng (eds) (2006); America’s Challenge: Engaging a Rising China in the Twenty-First Century (2011); and “A Restraint Approach to U.S.-China Relations: Reversing the Slide Toward Crisis and Conflict” (2023), with Andrew Bacevich.

For nearly two decades, Swaine directed, along with Iain Johnston of Harvard University, a multi-year crisis prevention project with Chinese partners. He also advises the US government on Asian security issues.

Swaine received his doctorate in government from Harvard University and his bachelor’s degree from George Washington University. He speaks Mandarin and Japanese.