Last month, Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the Czech Republic, where he signed more than 30 deals worth nearly $4 billion. In an email interview, Richard Turcsanyi, the deputy director of the Institute for Asian Studies, Bratislava, discussed Chinese investment in Central and Eastern Europe.
WPR: How extensive is Chinese investment in Central and Eastern Europe, and what factors are driving China’s investment strategy there?
Richard Turcsanyi: To begin with, it is extremely difficult to establish unequivocally the amount of investments from one country in another’s economy. Various statistical sources notoriously show differences. Putting together the numbers from a range of publicly available sources, however, we can roughly estimate Chinese investments in the 16 Central and Eastern European countries to be between 5 billion and 10 billion euros, depending on the applied methodology.