After proposing the “New Silk Road” initiative, China has reached out to Central and Eastern Europe in the name of strengthening economic and trade cooperation, holding annual summits with the leaders of 17 countries in Central and Eastern Europe controlled by the former Soviet Union, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, since 2012, also known as 17+1. This year, the 17+1 became 17-6, with six heads of state, unhappy that China had bounced on its previous commitments, declining to attend, leaving China facing a serious diplomatic setback.
The “17+1” meeting between China and Central and Eastern European countries was held online on the 9th. However, the heads of state of six countries, including the three Baltic states, were unhappy with China’s bounced promise and were reluctant to attend the meeting because of their cold attitude toward Xi Jinping.
China hopes to make the summit a “Xi Jinping plus 17 leaders” summit, with Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin noting that the summit, chaired by President Xi Jinping himself, is the highest-level meeting of leaders since the establishment of the China-CEE cooperation mechanism. In his speech, Xi also said that China and CEE countries insist on mutual respect, cooperation without political conditions, equality among all countries of all sizes, and joint construction and sharing, and establish a cooperation structure based on the belief that “17+1 is greater than 18”.
However, this concept of 17+1 is greater than 18 has been ridiculed by the European media as a hope that it will not degenerate into 17-6 is less than 11. The six countries that snubbed China are the NATO members Bulgaria, Romania and Slovenia from Eastern Europe, and the three Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, whose presidents or prime ministers did not attend the meeting.
A diplomat said that the day before, Chinese diplomats put pressure on these countries to send “higher-level representatives” and that Beijing was surprised because the EU had only signed an investment agreement with China at the end of December and therefore only publicly acknowledged the summit at 6 am that day.
European media observed that it was a serious diplomatic setback for Xi, showing that China’s divide-and-conquer strategy in Eastern Europe is in trouble and will undermine its efforts to bring Central and Eastern Europe together. Xi has a first-class “divide and conquer” Trump card, and the EU had feared that Europe would be divided by China, but the Wuhan pneumonia pandemic Chinese propaganda has seriously damaged China’s image, and CEE countries have begun to turn to the 17+1 mechanism and are disappointed that China has not delivered on its investment commitments. The lack of economic and trade content also made several CEE leaders decline to attend.
Desperate for foreign funding, these countries welcomed the Communist Party’s Belt and Road, but soon found out that China had other plans and that its foreign exchange was dwindling to support the Belt and Road spending spree, and CEE countries became increasingly unconvinced that Beijing was actually offering the economic deal they initially thought.
Although Xi Jinping said that China plans to import a cumulative value of more than $170 billion worth of goods from CEE countries over the next five years. Zhai Qian, Director General of the European Department of China’s Ministry of Commerce, also pointed out the results of the summit, which included 53 commercial cooperation agreements totaling nearly $13 billion in infrastructure, energy, finance and many other areas. This fully confirms the vigorous economic and trade cooperation between China and CEE countries. However, Polish President Andrzej Duda directly said at the meeting that the trade between CEE countries and Beijing, there is a lack of mutual benefit. He hoped for more clarity and mutual benefit in the economic sphere between the Communist Party of China and CEE countries, and urged Beijing to lift administrative restrictions on Polish agricultural imports.
For China, the 17+1 summit sent a double message: relations between China and the CEE countries “have been fully restored” and are “unaffected by political changes in the United States “. But for the CEE countries, it is more important to consider security relations and diplomatic relations with the new US President Joe Biden.
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