Hangin' Out With...
Kun-Chin Lin '95

Our continuing investigation into the Harvard-Maxwell Air Force Base connection has led us to Kun-Chin (KC) Lin, who recently moved with his family from the University of Cambridge in the UK to Montgomery. 

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So, I’m kinda curious about why you would leave such a plum position at Cambridge—are you the world’s biggest Zelda Fitzgerald fan or something? 

I am embarrassed to say that I hadn’t been aware of the Fitzgeralds’ roots in Montgomery until we started driving around Ann Street and noticing the many street names referencing them! As a New Yorker, I savor the connection of the two cities for the Fitzgeralds and Harper Lee.

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I left the ivory tower to take up an intellectual and public service challenge. Like many, I have had a lot more time and less quotidian noise to set forward-looking goals for myself during the lockdowns in the UK and Cambridge’s shift to online teaching since March 2020. I have taught and collaborated with many brilliant military students in the M.Phil. program in my former department, and directed the university'’ research centers on geopolitics of rising powers that had addressed a policy audience broadly defined. When the USAF offered this full professorship—the first appointment of this rank for the Department of Spacepower at the Air Command and Staff College, set up to train space domain strategists for the U.S. Space Guardians and space officers of allied countries—I recognized it as a precious opportunity to redirect my knowledge and energy to where the rubber meets the road. Great power competition in space will affect my children’s future and open up academic discourse for years to come—just as Hugo Grotius and Alfred Thayer Mahan had conceptualized international waters and seapower in their respective centuries.

Of course, it took quite a bit of hard lobbying for my wife and two kids who are very British in their outlook to get onboard. . . . 

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Your work at the Air University of the United States Air Force will be significantly different from your research focus at Cambridge. What piqued your interest in that change?

Over the past five years, I have led programs on maritime security and rising China at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge. The maritime and space domains are mutually supportive in strategic and operational ways, but more importantly they share several common features such as difficulties for enclosure movements, the importance of access and user rights for stakeholders, a highly blurred boundary between commercial and military applications, the snowballing impact of climate change and pollution, and relatively underdeveloped international legal and regulatory regimes. My research agenda for the next couple of years will focus on US-PRC competition in the space domain, particularly delving into Chinese conceptions and strategies toward spacepower, reflecting on cognitive and operational challenges in gaining mastery over geographical space from a fairly recent starting point of American military hegemony at sea and in space. The Department of Spacepower has put together an amazing team of interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners to support dedicated research and teaching on the geopolitics of space, and of course I look forward to persuading DoD to back me generously. Research method-wise, it would be important to work with international partners and explore new data sources, as conventional “fieldwork” may be difficult given the sensitivity of my position and topic.  

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So what is China doing in space these days, and should we be worried?

I am sure many of you might be aware that China has registered major milestones over the past year, including landings on the dark side of the moon and Mars and putting in orbit first modules of a Chinese space station. These new capabilities tend to stoke our politicians’ and military leaders’ anxiety about our competitiveness in this critical domain, from our firms’ dependence on Chinese suppliers for our space hardware to the consolidating Russo-Chinese collaboration to undermine American superiority in multidomain warfare coordinated by cyber and space assets. Yet a Sinologist would remind us that even as the Chinese appear confident in asserting their place in the global order and in their techno-nationalist ambitions, they are constantly reminded of how their imperial predecessors were sadly exposed in the Opium War and after for an outdated Sinocentric worldview based on a weak technological foundation and a shifting sand of popular support. It is critical for our policymakers to respond to this historical sense of vulnerability that drives the expansion of the Chinese civil-military complex, and trade, investment, and innovation policies aiming to exploit the multiplier effects of a thriving space industry. There is clearly a need for Sino-American cooperation in exploiting space resources and containing the environmental impact of escalating space activities, but we need to better understand Beijing’s motivations to help set down feasible and fair parameters for multinational governance.

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What has been the most pleasant surprise for you and your family about the move here?

Well, discovering the Harvard Club of Alabama ranks pretty high on the fantastic social experiences in Montgomery. We have also been very impressed by the Blount Cultural Park and Theatre where the famed Alabama Shakespeare Festival takes place. The bridge and buildings are dead ringers for the originals at Stratford-upon-Avon, down to the thatched roof cottages that double as “loos” here! My son, age 8, is a fan of airplanes, and we learned that the Wright brothers operated a flying school on the site of the Maxwell Airforce Base. For him, there are scarcely any work places cooler than his dad’s. 

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What was one of your favorite memories from your Harvard days?

Rowing in a single scull on the Charles River, mesmerized by the smooth motions of the oars and the sinuous current under the Empacher shell. I also rowed at Oxford during my postdoc years, but there is nothing like setting off from the Newell boathouse and winding through the beautiful bridges on the way to the broadening vista of the downstream.