“Central and Eastern European countries may have a lower stake when it comes to smooth EU-China relations based on their relatively low trade dependence with China, which gives them a bigger manoeuvring space,” Ivana Karaskova, leader of China Observers in Central and Eastern Europe (CHOICE), said.Podcast: Play in new window | Download | Embedĭrone strikes in Pakistan. The China Communist Party’s foot-dragging on pumping money into the region prompted Lithuania to pull out from what it called the “divisive” Chinese 17+1 forum, created in 2012 to promote cooperation between China and the CEE region. This amounts to about 0.4 per cent of Lithuania’s total foreign direct investment.Īccording to Chinese official data, total trade between China and the whole of central and eastern European block stood at $103 billion in 2020. While in Lithuania, which is adopting an increasingly assertive policy towards Beijing, the total Chinese investment was around just $96m last year, according to the Central and Eastern Europe Centre for Asian Studies.
In neighbouring Czech Republic, China’s commerce ministry estimated $287m investments in the same year. In Slovakia, Chinese investments in 2019 were $269m, representing only one per cent of the total direct foreign investment in the country. But the divide and conquer policy has lacked substance. Paris and Berlin will be paying very close attention to Mr Wu’s visit,” Mr Barton suggested.įilip Šebok, Research Fellow of the Prague-based Association for International Affairs (AMO) Research Center dealing with China, said the Taiwanese leader’s visit was “in line with the recent developments in bilateral relations between Taiwan and these countries, building upon the cooperation throughout the pandemic- there were Taiwanese donations of PPE, reciprocated by donations of vaccines from the CEE countries”.Ĭhina’s strategy in central and eastern Europe has traditionally used the historical complacency of these countries towards Beijing to attract economic benefits against a firmer, united European approach. “We might expect (Paris and Berlin’s monopoly on EU’s China policy) to change moving forward. The growing agency of the CEE countries going their own way in dealing with Taiwan might undermine France and Germany, who, especially under Mrs Merkel, have long kept the EU’s China policy on a very short leash.
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