China’s Influence in CEE and Why Europe Must Start Shaping Its Own Narratives

This article is based on a policy brief titled ‘Borrowed mouths and laundered messages: China’s influence playbook in Europe’ originally published on March 9, 2026, by the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR).

When Europeans discuss foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI), Russia dominates the conversation. For very good reasons, Moscow has become the benchmark for how the EU conceptualizes disinformation, influence operations, and hybrid threats. While this focus is justified and necessary, it also means that China’s growing activity in Europe’s information space receives less attention, especially because it relies on methods that are less visible and more difficult to trace than Russia’s.

Shifting attention to Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) helps understanding these methods. This is not only due to the region’s traditional vigilance vis-à-vis external threats, but because it has already experienced a decade of intensified Chinese engagement and thus developed the knowledge and analytical tools needed to assess its forms and implications. In that sense, CEE may function as an early warning system for the rest of Europe.

Why Central and Eastern Europe?

CEE is no longer a peripheral region in European politics. Its economic strength, political weight, and security role have rapidly increased, and its voice carries more influence in Brussels and across European capitals than it did in the past. At the same time, the region has long demonstrated a profound sensitivity to external threats, shaped by its historical experiences and geographic location. The trajectory of Russia’s actions toward Ukraine illustrates this clearly – many CEE countries identified the risks early, while the rest of Europe was slower to react.

This points to a larger issue in how the EU responds to external FIMI threats. If it failed to collectively act on early warnings in the case of Russia, perhaps now, there arises an opportunity to learn from that experience and apply it to other external challenges before they fully materialize. Chinese FIMI in Europe is a valuable opportunity to do precisely that.

Europe’s (Reverse) Trojan Horse

When Beijing launched the 16+1 initiative in 2012, many observers in the West framed CEE as Europe’s potential Trojan horse. The assumption was that the region’s impoverished post-socialist economies, still catching up with the West, would welcome any investments – including those coming from China – and, in doing so, would expose themselves to external political influence. But over time this reasoning proved inaccurate. China’s 16+1 (now referred to as 14+1) initiative underdelivered, enthusiasm faded, and the format effectively became obsolete as Baltic states left and Czechia started to consider its exit.

At the same time, the regional context also changed significantly. Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reinforced a security-first perspective across CEE and the entire EU. China, Moscow’s close strategic partner unwilling to condemn Russia’s aggression, increasingly became part of that security debate in the region. Additional factors, including reports of Chinese espionage and controversies around Confucius Institutes, further perpetuated skepticism and scrutiny. As a result, the CEE region shifted from a perceived gateway for Chinese influence in Europe to one of the key hubs of expertise and knowledge-production on how that influence operates in practice – effectively pulling off a “reverse Trojan horse.”

Chinese FIMI in Practice

China’s earlier engagement in Europe relied heavily on visible instruments such as state media, diplomatic messaging, paid content, and partnerships with political and economic elites. While these tools remain part of the broader toolkit, their effectiveness has become limited, as explicitly pro-Chinese messaging rarely gains traction in mainstream public debates.

Therefore, over the past several years, a shift has taken place toward more indirect methods that operate through local, more organic environments. Evidence from Poland and Czechia points to a set of recurring techniques. One is “borrowing mouths” – relying on local influencers, commentators, or seemingly independent voices to communicate narratives aligned with Chinese interests, lending them much-needed credibility and cultural familiarity. Another is “bait and switch,” where audiences are first attracted to certain channels or influencers through neutral lifestyle content – travels, food, or culture – before being gradually exposed to more political messaging.

Other Chinese FIMI techniques include obscuring the origin and attribution of narratives. “Information laundering,” for example, involves republishing content originating from Chinese sources across multiple outlets until it appears locally produced and independent. “Cloaking” goes a step further by disguising the origin of content from the outset, presenting it as purely domestic or neutral. And finally, “amplification” leverages domestic actors – including fringe, far-left or hard-right political groups – whose narratives already align with Beijing’s positions, boosting their visibility and helping normalize these messages within local debates.

Taken together, these methods create an ecosystem in which influence becomes difficult to attribute and by consequence easier to absorb. Rather than seeking immediate impact, their objective is to gradually shape the information environment so that certain narratives become familiar, credible, and ultimately accepted.

Narratives That Travel

Within this evolving framework, several narratives consistently recur across European information spaces. One of the most visible is the portrayal of China as technologically hyper-advanced and futuristic. Social media content frequently highlights infrastructure projects, bullet trains, robotics, and urban development, creating a powerful – and, above all, visual – narrative of progress. Instead of directly criticizing the EU, these messages rely on implicit comparisons, suggesting that China represents the future while the EU is associated with the past, stagnation, and bureaucratic lethargy – a contrast often encapsulated by remarks like “meanwhile, we in the EU have screw-on bottle caps.”

Alongside this, Chinese messaging emphasizes its role as a peaceful and responsible global actor. This framing has been particularly evident in relation to Russia’s war against Ukraine. Since 2022, Chinese communication has often adopted interpretations that shift responsibility toward NATO and the West, while avoiding direct condemnation of Moscow. Although not identical to Russian disinformation, this alignment contributes to creating a broader narrative environment that undermines Western unity and blurs accountability.

Finally, recent developments in the US under Donald Trump have created an additional narrative opening for Beijing. Periods of political volatility and unpredictability in Washington are used as a point of contrast, allowing China to present itself as more balanced, objective, and pragmatic. This is reinforced in cases of the US actions toward Iran or Venezuela, which Chinese narratives frame as unilateral, destabilizing, or in violation of sovereignty. Rather than directly attacking the US, this approach – as in the case of the EU – relies on comparison, positioning China as a more predictable actor in an uncertain international environment.

What It Means for Europe

The experience of CEE demonstrates that Chinese influence in Europe is present and evolving, with the capacity to shape debates gradually and quietly rather than through loud immediate disruptions. Addressing this challenge requires a shift in how the EU approaches the FIMI problem in general.

Much of the current EU response mechanisms focus on identifying and countering specific techniques, tactics, and procedures (TTPs). This includes mapping networks, exposing attribution, trying to regulate platforms, and building new institutional tools at the EU level. These efforts are necessary, but they also face a structural limitation. Many of the techniques used in Chinese FIMI – e.g., amplification, bait and switch, and engagement of influencers – are not exclusive to foreign actors. They are part of the broader information ecosystem and are – unfortunately – already embedded in European domestic political life, effectively becoming Domestic Information Manipulation and Interference (DIMI). As a result, and given that any EU-level responses to FIMI ultimately depend on implementation by its member states, building consensus in this area may prove difficult – after all, why would certain governments abandon the very methods that helped them come to power in the first place?

At the same time, a purely TTP-focused approach seems to reinforce a reactive posture, in which the EU continues to develop new instruments and taskforces tailored to respond to existing methods, rather than taking active part in shaping the information environment in its favor.

The EU therefore needs to complement its defensive approach with a more proactive one. Beyond mechanically tackling TTPs, there is a need to think more seriously about the EU’s own narratives and how they can compete with foreign ones in the same digital spaces. Chinese messaging gains traction not only because of its sophistication, but because it often fills gaps in European discourse – effectively monopolizing technological progress, economic dynamism, and future global relevance – and it does so in a highly visual, social media-friendly way.

Addressing this issue will not be easy. One could argue that coherent “European narratives” are difficult to define in today’s era of internal fragmentation, competing national priorities, and ongoing debates within the EU about its own identity – or the lack thereof. But this makes the challenge only more pressing.

If the EU does not seriously attempt to devise and project its own visions of technological and economic development, and its place in the global order, others will define those visions for it.