Tusk’s Chinese crossroads: Sino-Polish engagement in the post-PiS era
Tusk’s chinese crossroads: Sino-polish engagement
in the post pis era
WRITTEN BY MATTHIAS VAN HEREL
30 January 2024
In the make-or-break Polish general election in October 2023, opposition parties managed to secure an electoral victory over the ruling Prawo i Sprawiedliwosc (PiS) party. Despite this win and the appointment of a new government after eight years of PiS, the future reveals a bleak picture of democratic stagnation as PiS’s illiberal ghost will continue to haunt Poland’s political trajectory for years to come. But this is not the only thing that is rotten in the state of Poland. Shifting the perspective towards international relations reveals the worrying prospect of a renewed Sino-Polish rapprochement under Prime Minister Donald Tusk. In the past, Tusk’s Civic Platform proved to be instrumental in establishing Sino-Polish trade and constructing the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in Europe. One might ask oneself whether Poland is truly back in the pro-European camp.
The Polish success story revisited
Over the last three decades, the world has undergone unprecedented transformations following the collapse of the Soviet Union. For years, Huntingtonian optimism led Western political observers to label Poland’s post-Soviet transformation as one of the great success stories in recent times. With its overwhelmingly Europhile society, the country showed a more-than-promising trajectory towards economic prosperity, freedom, and political stability. However, Jaroslaw Kaczynski’s conservative Eurosceptic PiS party’s election in 2015 upended this narrative. PiS confidantes lodged themselves into the Polish constitutional tribunal, increased their political influence on the state broadcaster, and the free press was muzzled as Warsaw evolved into what has been described as an illiberal form of government.
Whether Beijing will find a partner in the new Polish government will heavily depend on Beijing’s capacity to reinvent the BRI, as its current incarnation is losing momentum in Europe.
For some time, it seemed Alexei Yurchak’s ‘temporality of eternity’ would continue to thwart the Polish liberal democratic path as a coalition between Kaczynski and the far-right Konfederacja Wolnosc i Niepodleglosc appeared to be materialising. Nevertheless, on Sunday, 15 October, Poland once again discovered its inner ‘Gregor Samsa’. Journalists and EU officials were delighted to welcome back former European President Donald Tusk. With PiS clocking in at 37 per cent of the vote, a broad coalition of Tusk’s Civic Coalition (Koalicja Obywatelska), the Left (Nowa Lewica), and the Third Way (Trzecia Droha) got on its way to ousting PiS and ending Kaczynski’s tight grip on Poland’s political trajectory.
Polish society has shown that it is possible to beat populists at their own game. Nevertheless, Tusk’s coalition is not coming to power in a political vacuum. On the contrary, Tusk will have to operate in political conditions established by the PiS, and its turn to an illiberal democratic form of government has already largely incapacitated the new government before its actual formation.
Poland’s Chinese horizon
With Donald Tusk’s return to the European Council last month, Polish foreign policy is set to undergo a seismic shift after eight long years of confrontation between Brussels and Warsaw. Nevertheless, the new wave of ‘EUphoria’ might prove to be short-lived. While the warmly welcomed thaw in EU-Polish relations is certainly significant, the European Commission should be wary of a possible renewal in Sino-Polish rapprochement, a worrying dynamic in this new geopolitical age.
With China continuing to expand its economic horizon beyond its geographical constraints through the BRI, Beijing has devoted ample attention to the Central and Eastern Europe region (CEE) after Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 and Beijing’s corresponding foreign policy shift. After all, the BRI envisioned the CEE region as being a potential gateway from China’s port in Piraeus, Greece, to the European market. Poland occupies a highly strategic position along the BRI’s New Eurasian Land Bridge Economic Corridor (NELB). Prior to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, this route, which runs through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, and Poland, and crosses only two customs borders (China — Eurasian Economic Union — European Union), was the most efficient and safest land connection between China and Europe. In addition, further routes incorporated into Beijing’s BRI include Poland as a transportation nexus converging Balkan and several post-Soviet railways with land connections to European ports crucial to the BRI’s maritime component. Last but not least, Poland’s competitively priced road transportation sector is of paramount importance for the further distribution of Chinese goods across the EU.
Beijing very quickly understood that China’s economic success in Europe, and consequently the success of Xi’s centralising BRI vision, depended heavily on cooperation with Polish authorities — which at the time was Tusk’s Civic Platform (PO, ruling from 2007-2015). Consequently, Chinese efforts to court the Polish government well pre-dated Xi’s announcement of the BRI in 2013, as illustrated by the institutionalisation of Sino-Polish relations through the 2011 Strategic Partnership. This 2011 strategic partnership placed a particular emphasis on the local dimension and promotion of interprovincial and intercity cooperation as a new dimension in bilateral relations — as it turns out, for good reason. It is exactly these local entities and the private sector that proved to be key drivers of Sino-Polish engagement before the strategic partnership was concluded. Among these local entities, the city of Lodz, located in the centre of Poland, took on a pioneering role along the NELB, establishing a railway connection between Lodz and Sichuan Province.
After Lodz’s severe economic downturn in the 1990s due to the collapse of its textile industry, local authorities were forced to develop a new business model for the city. In this economic reinvention of Lodz, Civic Platform officials were vital in facilitating demands from the local private sector. In 2012, under the auspices of the Lodzkie voivodship marshal Witold Stepien (PO) and the mayor of Lodz Hanna Zdanowska (PO), contacts were established between Lodzkie voivodship and Sichuan province. The Lodz-based company Hatrans, an importer of Dell components, and its Chinese partner soon established a railway connection between Lodz’s Olechow terminal and Sichuan’s Qingbaijiang terminal in Chengdu catering to Dell’s objective of establishing a fast, reliable, and cheaper alternative to air and sea traffic to connect its Olechow-based factory with its supplier Foxconn. With the first train loaded with Chinese electronics and textiles leaving for Europe in December 2012, the Lodz-Chengdu railway was operational well before the formal announcement of the BRI. On the national level, the Civic Platform government later regarded Lodz as Poland’s BRI success story warranting the establishment of a Polish Consulate General in Chengdu to deepen local cooperation with China.
The election of PiS in 2015 introduced a great degree of uncertainty for Sino-Polish relations. At first, PiS seemed eager to maintain the upward trend in Sino-Polish relations, becoming a founding member of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and elevating bilateral relations to the level of a comprehensive strategic partnership. However, discussions over the construction of a Multimodal Technology Park including container storage yards, a variety of warehouses, and office spaces facilitating trade through road, rail, and air transport expanding Lodz’s operations beyond its rail-based model abruptly upended Warsaw’s railway dreams, as Hatrans' joint venture bid with its Chinese partner to acquire a 33-hectare site belonging to the Military Property Agency was nullified at the end of 2016 by then-Polish minister of defence Antoni Macierewicz (PiS) on security grounds.
For Warsaw, Macierewicz’s decision marked the start of a paradigm shift in Sino-Polish relations. As trade with China became increasingly securitised, the PiS government focused on attracting Chinese know-how rather than looking for a cash injection. In addition, the Polish government initiated a recalibration to the Three Seas Initiative for regional development to diversify its dependencies away from China, as signified by the construction of the Centralny Port Komunikacyjny (CPK), PiS’s flagship project based on the same multimodal premise as Lodz’s botched Multimodal Technology Park. While the CPK does not fully exclude Beijing (as the plan leaves room for a Chinese share), it is a clear marker of PiS’s shift towards a more pragmatic position on China.
Tusk: A blessing or a curse?
Looking at the recent history of Sino-Polish relations reveals that Tusk’s Civic Platform was an enabling factor in the advancement of Sino-Polish economic ties and the construction of the BRI in Poland. On the surface, the reign of PiS saw a continuation of this rapprochement through high-level diplomatic contacts. However, material developments on the ground stagnated as trade with China became securitised.
With the return of Tusk and his Civic Platform to the Polish government, Beijing will likely try to pick up from the point where it left off in 2014, in regards to betting on the Civic Platform’s track record on the BRI. However, whether Beijing will find a partner in the new Polish government will heavily depend on Beijing’s capacity to reinvent the BRI, as its current incarnation is losing momentum in Europe. It is clear that Poland is no longer looking for classic infrastructural development, and consequently the ball is in China’s court to develop more attractive alternatives such as multimodal transshipment hubs. In addition, one might wonder whether economic benefits can still outweigh the security concerns linked to the increased exposure to Xi Jinping’s China. As of now, Tusk seems to prioritise Warsaw’s relationship with Brussels, as exemplified by his attendance at the European Council instead of the Third Belt and Road Forum in October 2023 — unlike Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban. Nevertheless, Sino-Polish rapprochement cannot be ruled out, and that is in itself a worrying prospect for the EU’s unified external action towards China.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent that of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biography
Matthias van Herel is a PhD Researcher at the KU Leuven America Europe Fund (AEF) hosted by the Leuven Centre for Global Governance Studies, a KU Leuven and Jean Monnet Centre of Excellence. His research focuses on societal support for illiberal forms of government and its implications for Loewenstein’s model of militant democracy. Image credit: Flickr/Ministerstwo Rodziny, Pracy i Polityki Spolecznej.