In comparison to Russia, which has been trying to retain pre-eminence over the post-Soviet space and to prevent the EU’s eastern neighbours from moving closer to the EU, China is a relatively new player in the region. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, China was primarily interested in military technology from Ukraine. Only with the inception of the Belt and Road Initiative in 2013 did China discover the Eastern European and South Caucasus countries for their geographic location along the BRI that connects China with Western Europe.

This paper explores the role of China in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood countries since the end of the Cold War and analyses how China has affected the political structures of these states. All EU eastern neighbourhood countries have actively sought China’s political and economic engagement as a counterbalance to Russian influence and to mitigate EU conditionality or the feeling that integration into the EU would be out of reach. China, with its agenda of undermining democratic norms at the international level, which it is articulating increasingly assertively, creates a challenge to the EU’s normative agenda of democracy promotion in the EU eastern neighbourhood.

However, China’s direct impact on the countries’ political structures is still limited and indirect. Politically, China has not been a reliable partner as far as the EU’s eastern neighbourhood countries’ territorial conflicts with Russia are concerned. Rather than pursuing a regime change agenda in these countries, China pursues narrow economic objectives, and even its economic presence is comparatively limited. Trade with China has increased, but except for Ukraine, this led to large trade imbalances for them. There is some evidence of mismanagement, elite capture and corruption in Chinese investment projects. At the same time, infrastructure construction with Chinese companies have often been financed by (international) lenders other than China. China is facilitating the normalisation and diffusion of digital dual-use surveillance technologies, even to contexts where the protection of individual rights is weak. Finally, China has increased its outreach to citizens through media and educational institutions in the EU’s eastern neighbourhood countries with a China-friendly narrative that is critical of the West.