Sarah Kirchberger is a nonresident senior fellow with the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security. She serves as academic director at the Institute for Security Policy at Kiel University (ISPK) and vice president of the German Maritime Institute. Her current work focuses on maritime security in the Asia-Pacific region, emerging technologies in the maritime sphere, Russia-China military-industrial relations, China’s arms industries, and China’s naval development. In April 2023, she testified before the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission on China’s subsurface warfare.

Previously, Kirchberger was assistant professor of contemporary China at the University of Hamburg and also worked as a naval analyst with shipbuilder TKMS Blohm+Voss. She is the coauthor of Russia-China Relations: Emerging Alliance or Eternal Rivals? (2022) and author of Assessing China’s Naval Power: Technological Innovation, Economic Constraints, and Strategic Implications (2015). Her earlier work includes a monograph on informal institutions in the Chinese and Taiwanese political systems as well as studies of reform discourses within the Chinese Communist Party and of Chinese perceptions of Taiwan’s postwar transformation. She completed undergraduate and graduate studies in sinology, political science, and archaeology in the German cities of Hamburg and Trier, as well as Taipei, Taiwan. She holds an MA and a PhD in sinology from the University of Hamburg.