Rivalry in the Middle East? Japan’s CEAPAD initiative and China’s rise

Abstract

Ever since the so-called rise of China has started, Sino-Japanese relations have been increasingly described as a rivalry between both states. For the most part, this assumed rivalry has been analyzed on the global level or within the boundaries of the East Asian region, while the consequences of this rivalry for other world regions, such as the Middle East, have been largely neglected in the literature. In order to fill this gap, this article investigates how China’s growing presence in the Middle East, and in particular regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, influences Japan’s own foreign policy in this troubled region. It utilizes a modified concept of the strategic rivalry approach, called ‘asymmetric rivalry’, which challenges the widespread notion that rivalry needs to be mutually perceived by both sides and thus analyzes the assumed Sino-Japanese rivalry in the Middle East from a Japanese perspective. By focusing on the case of Japan’s CEAPAD initiative, which aims at coordinating East Asian countries’ developmental assistance towards the Palestinian Authority while deliberately excluding China, the present article shows that the perception of Japan’s foreign policy elite of China as a rival decisively influences how Japan’s foreign policy is shaped in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.