China in the Western Balkans, 2025-2026: Divergent Patterns of Pragmatic Engagement

The outbreak of the war in Ukraine in 2022 and Donald Trump’s return to the White House in 2025 changed the European environment for engaging with China. The war generally weakened the attractiveness of closer ties with Beijing in much of CEE by highlighting their geopolitical costs, particularly in light of China’s relationship with Russia. Trump’s return introduced a more complicated dynamic, making European strategic autonomy, diversification, and room for maneuver more salient.

Yet neither produced a uniform response across the Western Balkans, nor a dramatic realignment with China. What 2025 and the first half of 2026 show instead is a region recalibrating the terms of engagement rather than alliances. The relevant divide is not between governments that deal with Beijing and those that do not – virtually all of them do – but between how far that dealing is allowed to reach, and what it is permitted to touch. 

Strategically Western, Economically Open

Most Western Balkan governments keep their economies open to China while keeping that openness firmly subordinate to EU commitments and NATO membership. Croatia and Slovenia illustrate the point from inside the Euro-Atlantic core. Croatia used the 20th anniversary of its comprehensive cooperative partnership with China to intensify diplomatic engagement – Foreign Minister Radman’s 2025 visit to Beijing was the first at that level in 12 years – while channeling the relationship into green energy, infrastructure, and scientific cooperation. None of this altered Zagreb’s Euro-Atlantic anchoring – Croatia is a selective pragmatist, not an agenda-setter in Europe-China relations. Slovenia followed a parallel logic with sharper economic edges: it opposed EU tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles in 2024 to protect its automotive links, and in March 2026 became the first eurozone state to issue yuan-denominated bonds. High-level exchanges continued through 2026, and Ljubljana’s March elections left the underlying trajectory – active economic diplomacy without geopolitical repositioning – undisturbed.

Albania and North Macedonia sit further from the EU core but follow the same pattern. Albania’s economic openness – China is its third-largest trading partner – coexists with an unshaken commitment to NATO and the EU. Prime Minister Rama’s calls for deeper economic cooperation, announced after his party’s fourth consecutive election win in 2025, have so far produced neither new trade or investment agreements nor any softening of Tirana’s Western alignment. North Macedonia’s relationship proved more exposed to friction: a November 2025 meeting between North Macedonian parliamentarians and Taiwanese representatives drew a firm but contained Chinese response, echoing the 1999 recognition dispute that once froze relations. By early 2026, ties had reverted to their pragmatic baseline, reinforced by trade growth and a high-level visit to the China-CEEC Local Leaders’ Meeting – though EU institutions continue to flag North Macedonia as vulnerable to foreign influence operations. 

Montenegro shows what happens when this pattern tightens after a scare. The Bar-Boljare highway’s first section, built on a Chinese loan, became a byword for debt-trap risk and required a 2021 EU-brokered hedge. Coupled with the political shift that followed Milo Đukanović’s fall, it changed how, not whether, Podgorica works with Chinese constructors. The 2026 contract for the highway’s second section relies on European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (EBRD) and EU financing rather than a Chinese loan, yet still awards construction to a Chinese consortium. Montenegro’s decision to end visa-free travel for Chinese citizens from November 2026 subordinates the relationship to EU accession requirements, even as cooperation in trade, investment, infrastructure, and green technology is set to continue, with China recently approving roughly €13 million in grants to Montenegro. Together, these cases show a consistent formula: economically, doors stay open to Beijing, but geopolitically and strategically, these states remain firmly anchored within the EU and NATO.

Politically Fragmented, Broadly Engaged

Bosnia and Herzegovina complicates this picture without leaving it. As an EU candidate and NATO partner, its Euro-Atlantic path remains formally unchanged. But the country is split into two politically autonomous entities – the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Republika Srpska – and because it has no single, coherent national strategy toward China, the relationship is shaped less by state choice than by the state’s own fragmentation. Divided authority gives political and economic actors room to pursue Chinese partnerships on their own terms, with Republika Srpska the most consistent partner, its positions on the global stage receiving backing from Beijing. That divergence shows up starkly in the data: the 2025 China Index recorded Beijing’s influence declining across most of the region while rising in Bosnia and Herzegovina, concentrated in Srpska, where Chinese firms have secured infrastructure contracts without competitive tender.

But 2025-2026 activity was not confined to Srpska. The Federation signed a roughly €100 million memorandum with Sinopharm in April 2026 to modernize hospitals in Sarajevo and Livno, and launched academic cooperation in Sarajevo in June with the opening of a Research Center on Building a Community With a Shared Future for Mankind – its name drawn directly from Xi Jinping’s signature foreign policy concept. Across both entities, trade and tourism rose through 2025, and the countries marked 30 years of diplomatic relations. The picture, then, is one of engagement across both entities rather than a Srpska-only story – but engagement that state fragmentation, not state strategy, makes possible, and that transparency advocates warn raises accountability concerns beyond Srpska’s institutions.

Strategic and Constrained Choices

Serbia breaks this pattern. It remains committed to EU accession, but while other governments treat China as an economic option, Belgrade treats the relationship as a pillar of policy in its own right – what Chinese diplomacy calls an “ironclad friendship.” Xi Jinping and Aleksandar Vučić met twice in 2025, the Serbia-China free trade agreement pushed trade past $9 billion, more than 30 agreements were signed during Vučić’s May 2026 visit, and a Chinese state firm now anchors Serbia’s Expo 2027 infrastructure. Crucially, the relationship extends into hard security: a Serbian special-forces unit trained jointly with Chinese counterparts in 2025 over NATO and EU objections, and by March 2026 Serbia had become the first European operator of Chinese CM-400AKG missiles. This combination of political signaling, continued industrial presence, and military cooperation makes Serbia’s engagement with China a regime-level strategic choice, not a variant of pragmatic openness.

A very different kind of outlier sits alongside it: Kosovo. Pristina has no formal diplomatic relations with Beijing, which continues to treat the territory through the lens of Belgrade’s sovereignty claims, and local authorities remain openly wary of China. Yet economic exposure has grown regardless: imports from China roughly doubled between 2021 and 2025 to some €900-920 million, about 13 percent of the total, making China the third-largest source of imports despite the absence of political ties. Beijing’s presence works through trade links, business networks, and local and cultural exchanges rather than diplomacy – but it is a noticeable, documented, and expanding presence, nonetheless.

Beyond Pro- and Anti-China 

The period from 2025 through mid-2026 points to persistence rather than rupture. Most Western Balkan governments combined firm Euro-Atlantic commitments with continued, practical economic engagement with China. What varies is the degree of exposure, the institutional conditions shaping it, and whether it spills into political or security cooperation. Serbia remains the most deeply embedded partner, Kosovo authorities the most politically distant, Bosnia and Herzegovina the clearest case of fragmentation enabling engagement, and the governments of Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, and Slovenia variations on managed openness.

More broadly, the changing European environment has reshaped the conditions of Chinese engagement in the region more than its underlying presence. Neither the war in Ukraine nor transatlantic uncertainty has pushed the Western Balkans decisively toward or away from Beijing. Instead, both have sharpened the line between economic engagement and strategic alignment, making it a more useful analytical tool than “pro-” or “anti-Chinese” labels ever were. Chinese influence persists wherever Beijing can offer something governments, entities, or local actors want – financing, trade, technology, security cooperation – but its capacity to convert that offer into strategic leverage remains sharply uneven across the region. The Western Balkans therefore illustrates both the limits and the resilience of Chinese influence at once: Beijing has not displaced the EU and NATO as the region’s dominant strategic framework, but the geopolitical strains of 2022 and 2025 have not closed off the space for pragmatic engagement with China either.

This article is part of the 2025-2026 CEE China Policy Audit to be published by CHOICE in September 2026.