The Green Continent has always played an important role in international interactions, and having about a quarter of world trade, it has been the focus of great powers, especially the triangle of America, China, and Russia, along with the Middle East. In this regard, in April 2024, we witnessed the third visit of the Chinese president to Europe. It can be said that one of the main goals of this visit is to revive China's role in foreign exchanges with Europe and strengthen interactions, especially with the center and east of the continent. At the same time, transatlantic interactions and the war in Ukraine must have been among the topics of the negotiations. Trade relations of the Union Europe and China are worth 940 billion dollars in 2023, and the deficit of 320 billion dollars of the European Union is high. Also, China's foreign direct investment in the European Union is concentrated in three countries: France, Germany, and Hungary.

It must be acknowledged that the chosen destinations by Xi Jinping in Europe- France, Serbia, and Hungary- have a strong narrative significance. Xi's visit, which follows German Chancellor Olaf Schulz's visit to Beijing and precedes Vladimir Putin's visit to China in early May 2024, shows China's economic and geopolitical ambitions, which, like Russia, has the main strategic goal of separating Europe from the Union which in a way reinforces Emmanuel Macron's idea of European strategic autonomy.

This is the third visit of the Chinese leader to Europe. The first visit was in 2014, as in 2019, when he visited Italy and France, and important business deals were signed, including one in favor of France to buy 300 Airbus aircraft worth 30 billion euros. An agreement was also signed in Rome, as a result of which Italy became the first G7 country to join the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). However, in the meantime, things have changed significantly, and in December 2023, Italy decided to abandon the BRI project and refuse to renew the memorandum signed five years ago. China's other major strategic project for Eastern Europe, the so-called 16+1 cooperation agreement, which at one point even became 19+1, fell apart, also after Lithuania and the Czech Republic decided not only to leave but also to develop closer ties with Taiwan.

It is no secret that Emmanuel Macron has a common point of view with Xi that US hegemony- as well as Europe's unconditional complicity with US foreign policy- must be replaced by a multipolar world order. While Macron's recent visits to India and Brazil prove that France wants to remain at the forefront of this global change, the multipolar order, for China and Russia, mainly means recognizing their legitimate right in the sphere of influence in their areas of interest. Although the European Union is very interested in Beijing from a commercial point of view, the Chinese do not take it seriously as a geopolitical actor, seeing it as a kind of appendage of the United States. It is a concrete fact that the Chinese elites and even the public in general are worried about the relations with the United States, and in general, it can be said that China likes to say that it wants a strong Europe and even a strong Russia in order to compete with Washington.

It is also possible to evaluate the choice of Serbia and Hungary on the route of Xi Jinping's visit to Europe with the aim of weakening the transatlantic relations and even the convergence of the European Union. Of course, both countries are part of the BRI project and are seen as China's points of influence in the Western Balkans and in the European Union. China prefers to build bilateral relations with European Union countries, which are much easier to dominate as a whole. Moreover, the bilateral approach affects the EU's coherence on punitive measures against China.

For China, Serbia is important, where Xi made a triumphant visit, and tens of thousands of people waved the flags of the two countries- where China enjoys an 85% favorable opinion due to its geostrategic location in the Balkans. At the same time, the Chinese, taking advantage of Europe's financial problems to manage the Greek crisis, bought the port of Piraeus in 2015, which is undoubtedly the most important of the 61 Chinese projects worth more than $21 billion in the Balkans. Of course, one of China's most important projects is the renovation of the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed railway, which will extend to Athens. But another political and security reason why the Chinese leader went to Belgrade for the second time in the last five years is related to the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy during the NATO attacks in 1999 during the Kosovo crisis, and perhaps from this point of view, Belgrade was an ideal territory for a common anti-Western and mainly anti-American narrative.

Another destination of Xi was Budapest, which Orban's government wants to turn the country into a first-class logistics center through a massive re-industrialization effort. Viktor Orbán was the first European Union leader to join the BRI project. The main goal of Budapest is to directly compete with the German automotive industry in the electric vehicle sector. Chinese Amperex Contemporary Technology Co. is building a $7.8 billion electric car battery factory in Hungary, and BYD, China's largest electric car maker, is also building a factory in the southern Hungarian city of Szeged. All these initiatives are part of China's long-term strategy to undermine European Union convergence while increasing its influence in some member states, offering them privileged relations in terms of investment and trade.

Overall, Xi's recent visit to Europe can be considered an effective step in reviving and strengthening China's interactions with the green continent and restoring Beijing's position in power equations at the top international level. In any case, the crisis in Ukraine caused Europe to become more dependent on the United States in terms of security and defense, and due to the reduction of exchanges between the green continent and Russia, it is necessary to strengthen Europe's economic view on cooperation and exchanges with China and somehow influence and limit Beijing's help to Moscow.

Ali Beman Iqbali Zarch, Head of the Eurasian Studies Department

  (The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the IPIS)