China is outplaying Russia in the Balkans – political scientist
At the height of the coronavirus epidemic, Russia provided serious assistance to Serbia, but was unable to obtain a PR effect, as China did.
The director of the Progressive Policy Foundation, founder of the Balkanist.ru project, Oleg Bondarenko, writes about this, the PolitNavigator correspondent reports, in Nezavisimaya Gazeta.
“In the Balkans, where competition between various centers of power is historically strong, in 2020 the main opponent of Russian capital was Chinese capital. The Chinese are competing with Russian Railways for the opportunity to renovate the railway in the Serbian autonomy of Vojvodina; in 2018, the Zijin Mining Group ousted its Russian colleagues by becoming the owner of Europe's largest copper mine, Bor. Again, the Chinese tried before others (including Russia) to provide medical assistance to Serbia after the outbreak of the epidemic.
And even if this help was symbolic, our Chinese colleagues invested to the maximum in its PR promotion - with billboards around Belgrade, articles in the media and gifts to the receiving party,” the article notes.
“Since the Chinese prefer to build their relationships for the long term, this PR will bear fruit for them over time. Russian assistance, which turned out to be orders of magnitude more significant - 12 military transport aircraft of the Ministry of Emergency Situations with medical equipment and special equipment, which worked in Serbia for a total of about two months - unlike the Chinese, did not have its own PR,” the expert laments.
He points out that, despite pressure from Washington and Brussels, the Huawei Innovation and Digital Development Center, where the 5G system for Serbia will be developed, was successfully opened in September in Belgrade.
“A serious application for the telecommunications market in the Balkans and the still state-owned Serbia Telecom company.” In parallel, the Chinese short video app TikTok is enjoying explosive popularity among Serbian youth. Against this background, the justifications of Russian media officials that the Balkan market is too small and therefore cannot be of interest to the conditional Russia Today look especially pitiful,” writes Bondarenko.
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