Ústav mezinárodních vztahů

Half a decade after it was launched, the network of cooperation between China and 16 Central and Eastern European countries has brought uneven economical and political fruits so far.

The so-called 16+1 was established in 2012 as Beijing's initiative to cover various issues such as investment, trade, but also culture or education.

The group includes 11 EU countries: Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia; and five non-EU countries from the Balkans: Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro and Serbia.

It fits into China's global strategy to engage new partners in political and economic ties in different formats.

Despite having a permanent secretariat, the Cooperation between China and Central and Eastern European Countries - the initiative's official name - is more a series of bilateral relationships with no overall coherence, as experts pointed out in discussions at the Prague European Summit conference earlier this month.

"It's not really a multilateral format," Petr Kratochvil, the director of Prague's Institute of International Relations, told EUobserver.

"It's more a group of countries that China took to have bilateral ties with. It's mainly Poland and Hungary in terms of investment, and Romania and Serbia for building projects."

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Petr Kratochvíl is the Director of the Institute of International Relations Prague and among his areas of interest are for example Czech foreign policy or the political relations in the post-Soviet area.