Chinese and Japanese Foreign Policies toward Central Asia from a Comparative Perspective

Abstract

The Asian economic powerhouses of China and Japan have been actively searching for their own modes of engaging CA states as part of their efforts to redefine their (political, economic, humanitarian, etc.) roles in international affairs in the changing international environment. This search for ways to interact with the international community largely reflects changes in the economic power of these states, with China increasingly assuming larger roles and Japan struggling to keep its economic interests represented in different parts of the world. These paradigms call for adaptations to the economic and foreign policies of these states and encourage them to reformulate their roles by redefining their interactions with “others.” The process of constructing their relations with the CA region demonstrates the complexities of these tasks for both China and Japan. National role in this chapter is defined along the lines of Holsti’s conceptualization of “role” as “the policymakers’ own definitions of the general kinds of decisions, commitments, rules and actions suitable to their state, and of the functions, if any, their state should perform on a continuing basis in the international system or in subordinate regional systems.