Can China's charm offensive breathe new life into ties with central and eastern Europe?

China is carefully stepping up a diplomatic charm offensive to woo countries in the Balkans and Central Europe, but observers say it will not be easy for Beijing to revive its stalled cooperation mechanism with central and eastern Europe.

Days after a government reshuffle in Montenegro, Chinese ambassador Fan Kun paid a call to the country's newly named foreign minister Ervin Ibrahimovic, during which he reaffirmed China's willingness to cooperate with the young Balkan nation.

"China is willing to work with Montenegro to deepen cooperation in traditional areas such as infrastructure and tourism within the Belt and Road Initiative and the China-CEE cooperation mechanism, and at the same time explore new bright spots of cooperation in new energy vehicles, new energy power generation, new infrastructure and other areas," Fan told Ibrahimovic, who is also a deputy prime minister, on July 31.

Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.

The meeting came weeks after Jiang Yu, China's special representative for China-Central and Eastern Europe Cooperation (China-CEE), paid an eight-day visit to Bulgaria, Slovakia and Montenegro in late June - her third trip to the Balkans and Central Europe since taking the role in September 2022.

In May, China also hosted coordinators from 14 central and eastern European nations in Ningbo, a major port and industrial hub in Zhejiang province.

Wang Yiwei, a professor of international relations at Renmin University in Beijing, said China might be seeking to "break the ice" in hopes of rebuilding ties with the region, where suspicions towards Beijing's self-proclaimed neutrality on the war in Ukraine remained deep.

"It's very difficult to go back to the old days when, for example, leaders of China and central and eastern European countries met every year for a summit," he said.

"Now 'bloc confrontations' and a mentality of taking sides are running deep in the region."

First established in 2012 in the Polish capital Warsaw, the China-CEE cooperation mechanism intended to forge ties between Beijing and 16 central and eastern European countries through cooperation in trade, infrastructure and development projects.

Its membership included 11 European Union member states - Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia and Slovenia - and five aspiring EU member states from the Balkans: Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania and North Macedonia.

In 2019, Greece officially became the 17th member at the grouping's summit in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

However, in March 2021, weeks after Chinese President Xi Jinping hosted a virtual summit with his counterparts from the region, Lithuania decided to withdraw, citing an expanding trade deficit and less-than-expected investment benefits promised by China.

There has been no leaders' summit since, and a year later Latvia and Estonia decided to join their Baltic neighbour in abandoning the framework, which at that time was already in deep crisis following Russia's invasion of Ukraine, which raised scepticism among ex-Soviet states about Beijing's cosy relationship with Moscow.

Filip Sebok, a China research fellow and head of the Prague Office of the Central European Institute of Asian Studies, said Beijing had appeared to make a "deliberate" move by not pushing for a high-level meeting of the China-CEE framework, "which could very well end up as a failure with many no-shows".

But now it might be "a good time for China to try to breathe new life into the cooperation again", he said.

A key initiative of Beijing's charm offensive in the region could be its investments in the electric vehicle (EV) sector as Chinese manufacturers look to build production facilities to circumvent EU tariffs, and central and eastern Europe has been a popular choice in nearshoring for western Europe.

"At the same time, it might be beneficial for China to look again into CEE as potential political allies within the EU in terms of mitigating the impact of the EU's defensive trade measures, in the EV sector and elsewhere," Sebok added.

Wang, in Beijing, said it was "pragmatic" for China to focus on trade and investment ties.

He noted that Chinese EV investment could not only create new jobs but also bring the latest technologies and greenfield investment that central and eastern Europe has long been looking for.

"The China-CEE mechanism has been stalled for years and China needs to be more pragmatic," Wang said.

"It may not be possible to resume the leaders' summit in the near future, but a shuttle visit like a ministerial or special envoy should be helpful."

Several leading Chinese EV manufacturers including BYD, Nio and Gotion have invested millions of dollars into central and eastern Europe, notably Hungary and Slovakia.

Pushing for investments in electric vehicles was also high on the agenda when Polish President Andrzej Duda visited Beijing in June.

During his meeting with Chinese envoy Jiang in Sofia in June, Bulgarian foreign minister Svetlan Stoev also stressed that his country's priority for cooperation with China was the development of trade relations.

"Trade between the two countries has been growing over the past year, but Bulgaria would like to see an increase in the volume and variety of Bulgarian goods on the Chinese market, facilitation of export procedures for agricultural goods and achieving balance and reciprocity," Stoev said, according to the Bulgarian foreign ministry.

Sebok said in Prague that perceptions of China among CEE countries could also become "more favourable in the medium term". He cited Beijing's warm relations with Hungary and Serbia, Slovakia's China-friendly government led by Prime Minister Robert Fico, who is due to visit China in the autumn, and the "somewhat on the fence" position of Poland, which will take over the EU presidency in the first half of next year.

Even in countries such as Lithuania and the Czech Republic, where China-sceptic sentiments are strongest in the region, "a lot of things can change with the parliamentary elections there this and next year, respectively", he said.

However, as the Ukraine war drags on, uncertainty remains.

On the eve of a Nato summit in Washington last month, China and Belarus held joint exercises just a few miles from the border of Poland, a member of the transatlantic security alliance and a staunch ally to Kyiv in the war against Russia.

"With the development on the border with Belarus, where China plays an increasingly important role, the Warsaw-Beijing ties might get rockier going forward," Sebok said.

This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP's Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Copyright (c) 2024. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.