Whatever Happened to China’s ‘17+1’ Platform?

April 2022 marked the 10-year anniversary of the China-Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC) framework, often called the “17+1” format after the number of participants: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czechia, Estonia, Greece, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania North Macedonia, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Slovenia for CEE, “plus” China. (Greece became the 17th CEEC member in 2019; prior to that the grouping was the “16+1.”)

The anniversary, however, came and went without any fanfare – an odd omission from China, which generally attaches great diplomatic significance to such milestones. Where one might have expected a leaders’ summit and many congratulatory messages, China instead quietly sent its special representative to Central and Eastern Europe to tour the region in April 2022. Huo Yuzhen’s mission, as the state-run Global Times put it, was to “to further promote cooperation as this year marks the 10th anniversary of the China-CEEC mechanism, and to dismiss misunderstandings, especially over China's stance on the Ukraine crisis.”

That’s a good encapsulation of the state of the China-CEEC mechanism on its 10th anniversary. China’s refusal to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine may have been the last straw for the framework, which was already struggling.

“Ukraine played a quite important role in detaching the CEE region from China, because many countries in the region fear Russia and nowadays China is perceived as a close friend of Russia,” Andreea Brinza, the vice president of the Romanian Institute for the Study of the Asia-Pacific, told The Diplomat via email.

“…The mood right now isn’t conducive for any high-level interaction or large project with China, with the exceptions of Hungary and Serbia, of course.”

The China-CEEC platform was born in April 2012 under then-President Hu Jintao, but gained new prominence with Xi Jinping’s roll-out of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013. Suddenly Central and Eastern Europe was a crucial node in Xi’s plans for transcontinental infrastructure and trading networks linking China to the markets of Western Europe. The CEE countries, meanwhile, had big dreams of scoring a windfall of Chinese investment and trade.

But over time, those dreams soured. Despite China’s special attention to the CEE region, its investment and trade flows still mainly headed toward the richer countries of Western Europe.

Brinza summed up the dashed hopes in a 2021 article for The Diplomat:

All the appealing promises and proposals and the bombastic headlines of the first years of the 16+1’s life came back to haunt Beijing when most CEE countries failed to see consistent investment. Instead of infrastructure, they received forums; instead of factories they received exchange programs; and instead of exports they received summer camps. On those metrics, the 17+1 might still be active, but it’s not what CEE countries were hoping for.

Meanwhile, as China’s rise to prominence combined with increasingly assertive behavior, Europe as a whole began to show more concern about Beijing’s role in the continent. The European Union, in particular, suspected that the China-CEEC mechanism was meant to sow discord within the EU. Of the 17 CEEC member countries, 12 are also in the EU; the existence of a separate foreign policy platform including some (but not all) members of the EU sparked worries that Beijing was seeking to divide the EU from within. China has repeatedly denied harboring any such ambition, but never managed to justify the existence of the “17+1” to the EU’s satisfaction.

“[T]he war in Ukraine damaged CEE-China relations a lot, but these relations started to deteriorate even before the war,  in a slow and steady trend for at least five years now,” Brinza pointed out.

These concerns came to a head amid the COVID-19 pandemic, which soured public opinion of China through much of Europe. Pandemic-related restrictions on travel and gatherings also helped erode what was left of the 17+1 platform, “as many meetings, trade expos, conferences, exchanges, visits and so on were put on hold,” Brinza said. “To be honest, these meetings and visits were the backbone of the [17+1], its most tangible outcome and the thing that helped the mechanism look alive.”

The ninth China-CEEC Summit, held in February 2021, saw six of the CEE countries send lower-level representatives to what was supposed to be a leader’s summit. The fact that the summit was held virtually made it crystal clear that this was a political decision, not a question of difficult travel schedules.

In May 2021, Lithuania announced it was withdrawing from the “17+1” grouping entirely. Vilnius’ ties with China have only grown more strained since: Since its decision to open a new Taiwanese Representative Office in the summer of last year, the Eastern European country has been on the receiving end of Beijing’s unofficial economic sanctions – including a blacklist on Lithuanian exports.

Clearly, by last year the China-CEEC framework was facing serious headwinds. The 2021 summit included a laundry list of planned meetings. Some of these, most notably the trade and business themed events, went through as planned: the second China-CEEC expo was held in Ningbo in June 2021, as was the sixth meeting of the China-CEEC Business Council; the third China-CEEC SME Cooperation Forum took place in Cangzhou in September 2021; and the fifth China-CEEC Capital Mayors’ Forum happened virtually in 2021. But there was less progress on plans for high-level meetings, such as the “4th China-CEEC Ministerial Conference on Economic and Trade Promotion” and “4th China-CEEC Transport Ministers' Meeting.”

China did manage to convene the “2nd China-CEEC Ministers' Conference on Environmental Cooperation,” but only 12 of the “17+1” countries took part. Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Montenegro, Romania, and Serbia were all absent.

Likewise, in November 2021, when China’s Vice Foreign Minister Deng Li gathered the CEE countries’ ambassadors to China for a meeting, only 14 of the 17 joined.

On the official website of the China-CEEC platform, the lone event listed for 2022 was an international trade expo (held virtually on January 28). There was also a notice of “plans to hold the 4th China-Central and Eastern European Countries (Cangzhou) SME Cooperation Forum in 2022”; the notice was posted in January 2022 with no date given. There has been no update since.

If by January 2022 the China-CEEC framework was struggling, February 2022 brought what may turn out to be the killing blow: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

China’s partnership with Russia has long been a source of unease for the CEE countries, which vividly remember their subjugation at the hands of the Soviet Union and still see Russia as their chief national security threat. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine proved to Central and Eastern Europeans that Moscow remains a serious, even existential, threat. In that context, China’s response – not only refusing to criticize Russia for the invasion but blaming NATO for the bloodshed – shredded any credibility Beijing had as a reliable partner for most of the CEE countries.

After all, a whopping 15 of the 17+1 countries are in NATO, with Bosnia and Herzegovina and Serbia as the lone exceptions. While China may be intending its intense criticism of NATO for Washington’s ears, the other members of the alliance are hearing it as well. They see a China that downplays and scoffs at their own security concerns, while justifying Russia’s decision to invade a neighboring country.

China’s decidedly patronizing rhetoric toward Europe amid the crisis hasn’t helped, either. Beijing has a tendency to interpret every move taken by a U.S. partner or ally as being engineered by Washington – as though other governments have no agency to make foreign policy and security decisions of their own. This rhetoric was on clear display during the China-EU summit on April 1, when Xi told EU leaders that they should adopt “an independent policy toward China.”

Josep Borrell, the EU’s top diplomat, hit back in a sharply worded article: “We condemn Russian aggression against Ukraine and support that country’s sovereignty and democracy, not because we ‘follow the US blindly’, as China sometimes suggests, but because it is genuinely our own position.”

China has, unfortunately, adopted the same dismissive tone toward CEE countries’ concerns about the Ukraine war. Let’s go back to the April 2022 trip by Huo Yuzhen, China’s special envoy to CEE, which the Global Times said was specifically aimed at clearing up “misunderstandings” regarding China’s position on the Russia-Ukraine war. Global Times cited a Chinese expert’s view on the China-CEE relationship as background to Huo’s trip:

“...deeply influenced by the US, some CEEC countries consider condemning Russia as ‘politically correct,’ and they see China's stance on Ukraine very emotionally and such emotion has spilled over to bilateral cooperation. China’s pragmatic cooperation with CEEC has been affected by geopolitics and emotions fanned by the US, which should be paid attention to and dealt with calmly.”

Dismissing CEE countries’ concerns about Russia’s invasion of one of their neighbors as “politically correct” and similar concerns about China’s support for Russia as overly “emotional” is not going to win back any support in Central and Eastern Europe.

Against this backdrop, it’s hardly surprising that there have been no updates on this year’s China-CEEC summit in what should be a year of celebration for the partnership. Even in February 2021, following the ninth summit, there was speculation that it might be the last leader-level meeting, given the low attendance. The Russia-Ukraine war may have been the final blow to the already struggling framework.

Even if the China-CEEC framework survives, it can no longer claim to be a grouping of 17 Central and Eastern European countries. In mid-May, the foreign affairs committee of the Czech Parliament’s lower house called on the government to withdraw from the mechanism, following in Lithuania’s footsteps.

Brinza, however, is “quite sure that China won’t let this mechanism die.” She thinks China will keep its “zombie” platform alive as much as possible, “but maybe it will be at the ministerial level or a summit once every two years.”

Dr. Richard Q. Turcsanyi, program director of The Central European Institute of Asian Studies (CEIAS) and a key researcher at Palacky University in Olomouc, Czechia, agrees that the framework will likely continue in some form. “I estimate that many countries in the CEE region would be OK with meeting Chinese officials at lower levels, if for nothing else, then simply to continue developing bilateral relations, and communicate various issues to China,” he told The Diplomat in an email.

“However,” he added, “such ‘lower-level interaction’ could essentially be considered as the end of the 17+1 platform as we have known it.”