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China's long-term cooperation with Central and Eastern European countries (CEEC) has received a great number of academic debates for being part of China's Belt and Road Initiative and component of China-EU relations. It's noted China is not the only external "game player" in the CEEC region. After the end of the Cold War, Japan also enhanced its relations in the region through diplomacy and the provision of developmental assistance, which led to a deepening cooperation in the region within the Japan-EU framework of the 2010s. This article aims to form a comparative study of the strategies that China and Japan deploy in the CEEC in the historical review up to the present day, and to evaluate the approaches from institutional perspective as well as the infrastructure aspect when the two Asian countries dealing with the CEEC. It argues that China-launched cooperative scheme with the CEEC also draws the attention from Japan and Japan's relevant policies in CEEC cast significant implications on the development of China-CEEC cooperation. The comparison also rises some greater political landscape by not only involving the BRI and PQI, but also in QUAD and EU-relevant strategies. In discussing the above approaches and comparisons, the article concludes that China's various domestic and foreign policies towards CEEC present a "charming attraction" to Japan even in the context of China-US rivalry. Both Japan and CEEC need to be more pragmatic and positive towards cooperative mechanisms with China and embrace more opportunities to mutually support both China's and Japan's regional presences and influence for the continued development of the CEEC region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Relational diversity can be characterized by heterogeneous distributions of tie strengths in social networks and this diversity is present not only among humans, but throughout the animal world. We account for this observation by analyzing two network datasets from Facebook. We measure the strength of a tie by calculating the extent of overlap of friends between the two individuals. Based on the previous findings in human experiments, we argue that it is very unlikely that players will allocate their investments equally to their neighbors. There is a tendency that players prefer to donate more to their intimate friends. We find that if players preferentially allocate their investments to their good friends, cooperation will be promoted in PDG. We proved that the facilitation of the cooperative strategy relies mostly on the cooperative allies between best friends, resulting in the formation of cooperative clusters which are able to prevail against the defectors even when there is a large cost to cooperate. Moreover, we discover that the effect of relational diversity cannot be analyzed by adopting classical complex networks models, because neither of the artificial networks is able to produce networks with diverse distributions of tie strengths. It is of vital importance to introduce real social networks to study the influence of diverse relations especially when it comes to humans. This research proposes a brand new perspective to understand the influence of social relations on the emergence of cooperation in evolutionary prisoner’s dilemma games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the emergence of relationship-based cooperation by coupling two simple mechanisms into the model: tie strength based investment preference and homophily assumption. We construct the model by categorizing game participants into four types: prosocialists (players who prefers to invest in their intimate friends), antisocialists (players who prefer to invest in strangers), egoists (players who never cooperate) and altruists (players who cooperate indifferently with anyone). We show that the relationship-based cooperation (prosocialists) is favored throughout the evolution if we assume players of the same type have stronger ties than different ones. Moreover, we discover that strengthening the internal bonds within the strategic clusters further promotes the competitiveness of prosocialists and therefore facilitates the emergence of relationship-based cooperation in our proposed scenarios. The robustness of the model is also tested under different strategy updating rules and network structures. The results show that this argument is robust against the variations of initial conditions and therefore can be considered as a fundamental theoretical framework to study relationship-based cooperation in reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]