| Summary/Abstract |
Relations between the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the countries of the Gulf have been subjected to an escalating barrage of scholarly scrutiny. At first, academic writing subsumed Beijing's dealings with the Arab Gulf states and Iran into comprehensive surveys of Chinese policy toward the Middle East as a whole. Three landmark monographs fixed the bar for these initial accounts: Yitzhak Shichor's The Middle East in China's Foreign Policy, Hashim Behbehani's China's Foreign Policy in the Arab World and John Calabrese's China's Changing Relations with the Middle East.1 Efforts to situate the PRC's policies toward the Gulf in the context of broader regional developments continue up to the present, as exemplified by Geoffrey Kemp's The East Moves West.2 Such first-generation studies set out to be comprehensive not only geographically, but thematically as well. Attention is usually paid to a wide range of diplomatic, military, economic and cultural trends, albeit with an emphasis on interstate diplomacy.
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