Authors

Discussion

Beijing is actively turning Central Asia into its modern global innovation and industrial hub as a part of the construction of the transcontinental infrastructure bridge connecting Asia and Europe (Seniuk, 2022) and requiring for its effective future use a similar hub in Central Eastern and Southern Europe in the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). Of course, such a need of the Chinese economy is supported by impressive, albeit restrained in recent period, China’s investment expansion. Moreover, all this happened in a historically short period of time, less than half a century, during which China moved from the last to the first, and from an importer of initially very meager FDI, it became one of their largest exporters of its capital. During this time, China's OFDI has gone through a phase of exploratory development, rapid growth and transition and adjustment. 

The V4 group was created in 1991, primarily in an effort to strengthen sub-regional political identity and subjectivity and to move away from Moscow's control. After joining the EU, this trend of defending the V4's own subjectivity has continued and even intensified. However, due to the low level of institutionalization, the range of joint political instruments is small and joint policies are focused mainly on infrastructure and the environment, and to a lesser extent on security, reflecting the priorities of the country that took over the presidency of the group. In recent years, in light of the differences in positions on the Russian-Ukrainian conflict, differences in the security sphere have increased. 

Behind the peripheral appearance of the problem of Chinese investment in the EU, located on the eastern border of the Eurozone, actually hides a deeper and more essential problem of both post-industrial and post-pandemic restructuring and innovatization of the economic landscape of the entire European continent, as well as the geo-economic and global infrastructural transformation of the Eurasian continent in the context of BRI in framework of the Global Political Economy.