Yitzhak Shichor

Yitzhak Shichor
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Born	17 July 1944 Israel
Died
Nationality	Israeli
Residence
Occupation	Political scientist; sinologist
Known for	Timing of China–Israel diplomatic relations; China's Middle East policy
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Yitzhak Shichor (born 17 July 1944) is an Israeli political scientist and sinologist, professor emeritus at the University of Haifa and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is the main academic source for the argument that Beijing had decided on relations with Israel in the late 1980s, and that the date of 24 January 1992 was fixed by the Gulf War and the Madrid conference. He is not an official of SIGNAL Group, a shliach, or a lobbyist. Later papers cite him as the authority on the delay. A certificate from the Chinese ambassador in 2018 is an academic award, not a post.

Career

He took a BA at the Hebrew University in political science and the history of the Islamic countries (1965–68), and an MA, summa cum laude, in that history with Chinese studies (1968–72). The PhD is in international relations from the London School of Economics, 1973–76. His reserve rank is major. At the Hebrew University he chaired East Asian Studies (1984–87) and Political Science (1992–95), was dean of students (1990–94), and has held the Michael William Lipson Chair in Chinese Studies since 1993. He was head of Tel-Hai Academic College from 1997 to 2000, and professor at Haifa from 2002 to 2012, emeritus thereafter. On 27 December 2018 the PRC ambassador, Zhan Yongxin, gave him a certificate of appreciation for lifetime work in Chinese studies.

The research brief he gives is China's Middle East policy, energy, defence conversion, labour export, East Asian democratisation, and Sino-Uyghur relations. Books include Ethno-Diplomacy: The Uyghur Hitch in Sino-Turkish Relations (2009) and Missiles Myths: China's Threat to Taiwan in a Comparative Perspective (2008). He edited the Open University of Israel history All Under Heaven.

The 1992 argument

Shichor's reconstruction, as summarised by the Institute for National Security Studies, is the one used on the policy page. He links the earlier thaw to better Chinese relations with the United States, and to China's admission to the United Nations in 1971, with Israeli support, in place of Taiwan. Arms and military technology sales in the 1980s, he says, began with American encouragement, to strengthen China against the Soviet Union. The decision to open relations had been taken in the late 1980s. The date was fixed by two events: Israel's decision not to answer the Iraqi missile attacks of January 1991, which avoided a war that would have damaged Chinese economic interests, and the Madrid conference of late 1991, whose multilateral groups China wanted to join and could not join without relations. Diplomatic relations followed on 24 January 1992. Trade, on his figures, rose from $50 million in 1992 to over $1 billion in 2001, over $8 billion a decade later, and near $15 billion in 2021. The United States then forced Israel off the Phalcon aircraft sale and the Harpy drone upgrade.

His own later statement of the delay is political rather than technical. In Out of Proportion (2025) he writes that Israel was the first Middle Eastern government to recognise the People's Republic, that no relations followed until January 1992, and that the long delay was caused by Beijing's cultivation of the Arab and Muslim worlds, which required enmity toward Israel. The partnership was expected to stay limited. His claim is that it did not.

After 2023

The 2025 article opens from the appearance that Beijing had sided with the 'Islamists' after 7 October 2023 and that the relationship had broken. Shichor's argument is the opposite of a rupture. Israel, he writes, has been as important to China as other regional states, in economic growth, defence modernisation, technology and innovation, out of proportion to its size. The political line is the smaller part. The article is an academic claim about continuity. It is not a brief for SIGNAL Group, which cites the same history for a different purpose.

Related pieces are “Chinese-Israeli Relations in a Middle Eastern Context”, Mediterranean Quarterly, 2015; “Better late than never: China-Israel diplomatic relations in perspective”, in the Routledge Handbook on Contemporary Israel (2022); and “Prophecy: Ben-Gurion and the Ascendency of China”, China Quarterly of International Strategic Studies, 2024.

See also

• Chinese policy on Jews, Zionism and Israel
• Israeli Pressure Groups in China
• SIGNAL Group
• Shaul Eisenberg