Ask ten people in Southeast Europe what Chinese influence in the region actually looks like, and the answers will cluster at two extremes. For some, China is a strategic and security threat, buying loyalty through debt, elite capture and infrastructure. For others, it is a product of Western scaremongering, a story that inflates a marginal and beneficial presence into a geopolitical drama. Both pictures are confidently drawn, but neither is complete or particularly reliable. The gap between them says less about China than it does about the state of the scholarship and public debate trying to capture it.
Echo-chambers of concepts with little evidence
The field has largely split into camps that rarely engage each other. One is reflexively pro-Western, treating any positive account of engagement with China as suspect by definition. The other is openly sympathetic to Beijing, producing accounts that read more like promotional material than analysis. Both are internally consistent, but mutually unconvincing. And both are of limited use to policymakers, whose actual job is to weigh competing interests and constraints, not to pick a side in a narrative contest. The more useful work sits outside both camps, treating engagement as a matter of balancing interests and frictions rather than a verdict to be reached in advance.
Some of the vocabulary now standard in some China-watchers’ discourse, like malign influence, travelled into academic, policy and media use without passing through the slower, more rigorous stage of empirical testing. Concepts arrived pre-loaded with conclusions, and the research that might have grounded or challenged them came later, if at all. The effect is a discourse that sounds analytical, while skipping the rigorous evidentiary work that fills that concept with meaning. Recent scholarship on the wider CEE region makes a related point directly, arguing that the popular ‘Chinese influence’ narrative functions more as a widely circulated meme than as an empirically grounded account of what China actually does. The same happens in the camp that has been trying to push forward Chinese slogans that implicitly challenge Western global dominance – like “community with a shared future for humanity” – with similarly little independent evidence that they have any analytical value or have actually taken root.
The costs of thin empirical grounding are not abstract. The Montenegrin highway is the clearest illustration. A figure for Montenegro's debt to China as a share of total external debt circulated internationally at roughly twice its actual value, making its way into a hearing before the US Congress. The so-called ‘debt-trap’, inflated through a translation mistake and unsupported by actual data - but gone viral, raised unfounded fears that China will take over the Port of Bar. Subsequent reassessments of the same project have shown that the ‘debt-trap’ scenario, in which economic dependence converts into any kind of political or other leverage, has not actually materialized. However, once a claim like that enters circulation, correcting it is far harder than originating it - a useful reminder of how much weight numbers carry when they are not properly checked.
A problem of “China competence”
Underneath the polarization there is a more structural issue: very few regional scholars or policy makers speak Chinese, have spent meaningful time in China, possess the inter-cultural communication skills or understand its politics, history and society well enough to work from primary material. Most research on China's presence in SEE is therefore built on secondary, largely English-language sources and analyses produced in and for different contexts, then imported into the region. Funding for original empirical work is scarce, so the same handful of sources and claims are recycled across reports, gradually detaching from the facts that once underpinned them.
The same problem has another implication. The relatively few people in the region who do have direct China experience by spending time studying or working there tend to be recruited by Chinese companies, embassies, Confucius Institutes, research organizations or other China-sponsored entities. Their capacity is not leveraged by national diplomacies and administrations to boost SEE's policymaking capacity. The result is that first-hand expertise is pushed to the margins of research and policy work rather than integrated into it, leaving a competence gap that is rarely acknowledged.
The consequences are practical, not just academic. Blind spots persist about where and how Chinese engagement actually operates, which consequences, intended or not, might follow, and what effective China-policies should look like. Research security and academic cooperation are a case in point: a genuine area of exposure that went largely unexamined for years, simply because no one had thought to study the researchers themselves.
Measuring an engagement that wasn't designed to be measured
Part of the difficulty is structural rather than a failure of any individual analyst. National statistical systems in the region were built to capture equity-based FDI, bilateral aid from DAC-member donors, and trade flows declared at customs - categories that capture well how Western partners typically engage. They fail to reflect though how China often engages: sovereign-guaranteed loans that create no equity stake, trade structured to avoid tariffs or sanctions, aid channeled directly to municipalities or universities and not registered anywhere, investment routed through third-jurisdiction intermediaries that obscure the ultimate owner. None of this shows up directly in the data SEE governments collect, which means a meaningful share of China's actual footprint in the region is, by design of the measurement system and not by any conspiracy, simply not visible.
Reporting habits compound the problem, which not only inflates the apparent scale of China's economic presence, but also misrepresents the nature of China’s engagement. Pledges and Memoranda of Understanding, including for donations, investments, or infrastructure projects, are often reported by media and analysts as if they are certain and imminent, with no follow-up on what actually materialized – while much of it did not. There is also purposeful misrepresentation - of Taiwanese as Chinese investment, in the case of MeiTa's plant by Serbian authorities. Even without intent, methodological rigour on the exact form of engagement is frequently lacking: labelling as investment what is often a loan or a public contract funded through national budgets or European funds portrays China as a significant investor in the region (which it is not, except in Serbia) and casts Beijing as a disinterested, altruistic actor when the underlying logic is transactional.
A footprint that is real, but not the one usually described
None of this means China's economic role in SEE should be dismissed. It does mean the role is different from the one usually assumed. SEE economies are not interconnected with China the way Western Europe or the US are: few (if any) Macedonian or Albanian firms are weighing investments to or from China, few Bulgarian or Greek companies feel direct competitive pressure from Chinese firms, and few Montenegrin or Croatian businesses depend directly on Chinese technology transfers.
The region's exposure to China's global posture is real, but it is more indirect, concentrated in areas like import dependence rather than direct investments, and less systematically tracked than the exposure of larger Western economies - which is precisely why it deserves more research attention, not less.
While the economic footprint is sometimes inflated or misrepresented, that doesn't mean China's overall presence is. It just means the larger part of it is happening somewhere beyond the statistical data. The clearest blind spot is societal engagement, which is decentralized, harder to trace, and even harder to evaluate for medium- to long-term impact. People in the region are forming their sense of China less through official announcements than through platforms like Aliexpress, Temu and Shein, through TikTok, through affordable Chinese hardware and consumer technology. This is enhanced by an already fully built-out public diplomacy apparatus relying on state media, Confucius Institutes, embassy outreach, which operates at a scale that simply did not exist before the 2010s. I
In addition, nearly all countries in the region feature prominent academic, political, and mainstream public figures, particularly active online, who provide solid backing to Chinese media and promotional efforts. Together, these channels shrink the psychological distance to China and normalize its presence in everyday life, a dynamic driven both by domestic demand in SEE and motivations like curiosity, disenchantment with the EU and/or the West, exploring new and different available options, as well as by China's own coordinated - and sometimes uncoordinated - global outreach.
The cost of not knowing
None of this is a purely academic or analytical shortfall. Where evidence is thin, someone still has to decide what to believe and, in the absence of reliable evidence, that space gets filled by whoever is loudest, not whoever is right. Governments in the region are already making decisions about procurement, infrastructure financing, and diplomatic alignment under exactly these conditions. Businesses plan to expand, diversify, buy or not - often without proper intelligence - and will keep doing so whether or not the evidence catches up. The cost of that gap is not abstract: it shows up in loan terms negotiated without independent expertise in the room, in statistical categories that quietly miss how the money actually moves, and in a generation forming its view of China through platforms that no state institution is currently monitoring.
Closing this gap is less a matter of producing more opinions about China and more a matter of building the ordinary, unglamorous capacity - language and cultural competence, statistical data, institutional and analytical competence, and sustained attention - that allows policymakers to understand what is actually happening. Until that capacity exists, SEE will keep engaging with China from inside a fog that alarmists and dismissives are equally happy to leave uncleared.
by Ana Krstinovska
Image: Magnific