Lyu Jinghua is a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C., where she researches cybersecurity and U.S.-China defense relations. She served in the People’s Liberation Army for over twenty years, retiring as a colonel. In the last decade of her career, she was a United States analyst at the PLA’s Academy of Military Science in Beijing. She participated in a variety of international defense summits, including the Xiangshan Forum, Shangrila Dialogue, and Seoul Defense Dialogue, as a PLA delegate. In this lightly edited interview with Lyu, who is currently in Beijing, we discuss defense relations, technology competition, and the U.S. election. Lyu JinghuaIllustration by Lauren Crow How did you end up at Carnegie?  I’m a retired colonel in the People’s Liberation Army. My last position was as a research fellow at the Center for China-U.S. Defense Relations at the Academy of Military Science as a researcher. In 2016, I retire