China-CEEC expo is reiteration of Beijing's commitment to openness

Editor's note: Azhar Azam, a special commentator on current affairs for CGTN, is a market and business analyst who writes on geopolitical affairs and regional conflicts. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily those of CGTN.

The 4th China-CEEC (Central and Eastern European Countries) Expo & International Consumer Goods Fair is being held at Ningbo, Zhejiang between May 22 and 25. The event is expected to be one of the major platforms for CEEC to showcase their products, expand exports to one of the world's largest consumer markets and promote economic and trade cooperation with the East Asian economic powerhouse.

Since 2012, China's trade with the region increased at an annualized growth rate of 8.8 percent while its imports from CEEC have surged at an average growth rate of 7.4 percent, outpacing China's foreign trade expansion for the same period. Two-way trade reached a record high of $142.3 billion in 2024 with Chinese investments in the region topping $24 billion.

China has implemented a trial visa waiver program for ordinary passport holders from 38 countries including CEEC such as Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Estonia and Latvia. These measures ahead of the important exhibition will encourage business activities and further people-to-people exchanges between the two sides.  

Leveraging the strengths of its enormous market, Beijing has been determinedly enhancing its capacity for high-level opening-up on a larger scale, in a wider range of sectors and at a deeper level by establishing institutions, focusing key areas like trade, investment, consumption and innovation, promoting domestic reforms and deepening multilateral international cooperation. The exhibition is a visible manifestation of Beijing's commitment between itself and the outside world.

Over the years, the expo has developed into one of the most important podiums to foster China-CEEC pragmatic cooperation and push Beijing's imports from the region. At last year's expo, hundreds of CEEC companies displayed around 5,000 unique products to a large Chinese market and inked orders of roughly $1.5 billion, benefitting from China's high-standard opening-up and extraordinary promptitude of sharing its development opportunities with CEEC.

In a five-day event, some 62 foreign-funded projects were signed with a total investment volume of about $18 billion at a staggering 17.7 percent increase. Among signed deals, almost a quarter involved Fortune 500 companies and industry leaders, covering areas such as high-end equipment manufacturing, biomedicine and the digital economy. Projects such as Hungary's Quantum Cement, Slovenian ski equipment, Romania's eMAG Yangtze River Delta (Ningbo) Operation Center and the European Consumer Goods Exhibition Experience Center were successfully implemented.

As Ningbo hosts the only national-level expo in China that is wholly oriented toward CEEC, countries such as Bulgaria, Hungary and Slovenia are seeing it as a means to boost cooperation with China, gain efficient access to China and the wider Asia region, using the common space of the stand for meetings with contractors and marketing cutting-edge technologies to a large Chinese customer base, drawing parallels with China's goals of smart manufacturing, emission reductions and advancing digital technologies to deepen collaboration with the world's second largest economy.

Serbia's President Aleksandar Vucic's characterization of the moment as "the joint future of our two countries" was mirrored in his recent statement in which he said that Serbian exports to China had leapt 200 times over the last 11 or 12 years. The deepening cooperation in road and railway infrastructure, energy and investment will strengthen the China-Serbia relationship and regional economic and strategic significance.

Hungary is China's key trading and strategic partner in the region. Statistics suggesting that bilateral trade has surpassed 16 billion euros and Chinese electric vehicle giants are investing in the country have positioned Budapest as an important regional economic player and battery manufacturing hub in Europe, enabling it to become a "global leader of a great technological revolution." The U.S. continues to present China as a "strategic challenge" but Budapest has clearly stated that decoupling from Beijing is its "red line.

In addition to Serbia and Hungary, a total of 12 CEEC as well as nine other countries including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain are participating in this year's version of the China-CEEC expo. While this underscores the event's outreach to the rest of Europe, it's the attestation of Beijing's efforts to promote multilateral cooperation internationally and advance a new phase of its high-level opening-up.

A dramatic rise in the living standards of the Chinese population and growing demand for quality products in the country is encouraging CEEC to come and take advantage of Beijing's opening-up. Booming trade and investment ties, more than 50 cargo and passenger flights a week, over 2,619 China-Europe freight trains and the expo itself is a reflection of a resilient China-CEEC relationship and Beijing's commitment to openness, broadening horizons for a much-needed multi-level international cooperation to jointly deal with resurgent protectionism.

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