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Beijing’s Balkan Classrooms

While Confucius Institutes are closing across parts of Western Europe, China has found a more welcoming political environment in the Balkans.

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić (left) shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping during a visit to Beijing, China, Oct. 17, 2023.

While Confucius Institutes are closing across parts of Western Europe, China is not retreating from Europe’s educational space but adapting to it, reshaping its institutional presence, and diversifying its channels for projecting influence. In the Western Balkans, Beijing is expanding its academic footprint through a more decentralized, adaptive, and politically embedded model of education diplomacy. In Serbia, a third Confucius Institute opened in 2024. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chinese-backed Sinology programs are among the few consistently achieving enrollment quotas. In Montenegro, academic cooperation has extended into artificial intelligence and cryptography, setting off alarms in Washington.

Taken together, these developments point to a broader shift in Beijing’s strategy in the region, where China has found a more welcoming political environment. The governments in the Western Balkans pursue multi-vector foreign policies and have less stringent regulations in terms of research security and limits to foreign funding in academia. This has allowed China to develop a more decentralized model of education diplomacy built on scholarships, dual-degree programs, corporate-sponsored training, and technology-linked research cooperation targeting the region’s underfunded universities. 

As the United States strengthens research security and the EU moves toward de-risking, China’s strategy in the Western Balkans may foreshadow how Beijing adapts its approach and tests it in other politically flexible and receptive regions.

Serbia: The Poster Child

The latest China Index report for 2024 ranks countries according to their exposure to China’s policies. Serbia retained 34th place in the ranking of 101 countries, the highest in the region, making it the key strategic partner and a poster child of cooperation with China in the region. Beijing enjoys a close relationship with President Aleksandar Vučić and a great deal of goodwill among the population. Thus it’s not surprising that Serbia has emerged as the regional hub of China’s education engagement. 

Serbia is China’s most advanced education partner in the Western Balkans, with three Confucius Institutes. Mandarin is an elective subject in over 60 public schools, and even a compulsory subject in some. This suggests a degree of normalization of Chinese linguistic and cultural presence.

Cooperation extends well beyond language teaching, with Chinese companies entering the educational space. Surveillance technology firm Dahua Technologies and tire manufacturer Linglong signed a cooperation agreement with the University of Kragujevac and established scholarship programs for Serbian students, respectively. Linking industrial investment with academic training reinforces China’s influence across sectors.

Rather than relying only on Confucius Institutes, which have been discredited in Western Europe, China is broadening its engagement to include municipalities and private enterprises in moving toward diffusion and obfuscation of its institutional footprint. 

A Chinese cultural center opened in 2021, built at the site of the former Chinese embassy in Belgrade. As the embassy was bombed during NATO’s 1999 intervention, memory politics intersect with educational diplomacy to further boost China’s legitimacy and popularity in Serbia.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Sandbox

If China is attracted to Serbia by strong political relations and favorable popular opinion, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s internal fragmentation and weak economic prospects create a captive and highly deregulated space to test its educational diplomacy.

China exploits the divided political landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina to hedge its bets and maintain relationships with elites in both entities – the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, based in Sarajevo, and the Republika Srpska. In the latter, “the Sinology Department at the University of Eastern Sarajevo is the only department in the university with no shortage of students.” In 2011-2022, 97 students finished their undergraduate studies in the Chinese language, which is a large number for an entity with an estimated 1.1 million people.

Educational ties are reinforced through several scholarship programs, from degree-oriented programs to the China/UNESCO Great Wall Fellowship. The University of East Sarajevo has also signed an agreement with the University for International Studies in Jilin to provide dual degrees to all attending students. Such agreements deepen institutional dependency by tying academic advancement to Chinese partner institutions.

Montenegro: The Back Door

Montenegro’s case offers another angle of China’s education diplomacy: sector-specific and technology-linked cooperation. A tiny country of around 630,000 people, Montenegro hosts only one Confucius Institute, but in 2019 alone, 5,000 people enrolled in its courses. It has also sent more than 100 students and over 100 civil servants to China as part of exchange programs. This has been a notable success for China’s education diplomacy, allowing it to extend its influence to Montenegrin public administration. Some analysts have even claimed that Montenegro – rather than Serbia – is the regional leader in educational cooperation with China.

In Montenegro, just like elsewhere in the Balkans, Beijing promotes the creation of “Confucius Classrooms” at primary and secondary schools. These programs teach primary, secondary, and preschool children the Chinese language and culture through partnerships with Chinese institutions. In Montenegro, more than 700 students are involved in such courses. Due to claims that Confucius Classrooms could expose children to propaganda, there have been public protests against them in Canada and investigations into their work in Australia. 

At the private University of Donja Gorica, whose funders are reportedly close to former President Milo Đukanović, a “Tourism Confucius Classroom” was established in partnership with Beijing Union University in 2019. Its purpose is to strengthen cooperation and vocational education in Hotel Management and Tourism Management. 

Another partnership drew much sharper scrutiny. In June 2025, the University of Montenegro signed a memorandum of cooperation with China’s National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, operated by the National University of Defense Technology, overseen by the People’s Liberation Army and sanctioned by the U.S. Commerce Department. The agreement covers cryptography, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. 

Washington issued a public warning that such partnerships between Montenegro, a NATO member state, and China could pose risks of data leakage and knowledge transfers. The fact that the signatory of the memorandum, Rector of the University of Montenegro Vladimir Božović, received his doctorate in the United States in the field of mathematics and cryptography, only strengthened these concerns.

Albania and North Macedonia’s Avoidance and the Kosovo Exception

Compared to Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro, China’s educational presence in Albania and North Macedonia is significantly more modest. Albania hosts one Confucius Institute and several Confucius classrooms, but pushed back against stronger Chinese presence due to its aspirations of joining the EU and NATO. Albania-China relations therefore depend heavily on cooperation with Albanian media, cultural diplomacy, and tourism. In North Macedonia, Mandarin has not become embedded in the public school system on a large scale, and China’s educational visibility remains limited. 

The geography of China’s educational footprint in the Balkans contains one conspicuous absence: Kosovo. China does not recognize Kosovo’s independence and regards it as part of Serbia. Accordingly, there are no Confucius Institutes or official Chinese language programs, but Mandarin is an elective subject in over 60 public schools, and scholarships for further language study are provided by China. 

The Kosovo gap demonstrates that China’s educational outreach does not transcend geopolitical red lines – it reinforces them. China’s education diplomacy in the region follows recognition policy, underlining the strategic logic underpinning China’s outreach.

Decentralized Education Diplomacy for a Fragmented Region

Across the Western Balkans, China’s education diplomacy relies on heterogenous tools, including government scholarships, Confucius Institute grants, university-level agreements, short-term training courses, corporate-sponsored programs, and sector-specific research agreements. The shift in its approach reflects the lessons that China has learned from policy failures in the West. 

In the United States and parts of Western Europe, dozens of Confucius Institutes closed due to allegations of censorship, surveillance, and influence operations. Unlike Goethe Institutes and British Councils, Confucius Institutes are mostly located within host universities, giving them leverage over these institutions. In response, China sought to rebrand the institutes and create a more decentralised network of institutions through which to conduct its education diplomacy.

The EU is not immune to the offensive of China’s education diplomacy either, with the Central and Eastern EU member states particularly vulnerable given the financial constraints at even the leading universities. However, what distinguishes the Western Balkans is the scale of cooperation with China. 

Despite the fact that most countries in the region do not see Chinese funding as an alternative, but as an addition to EU funding, the region is seeing big investments. According to some estimates, more than half of China’s total investments in Europe have been in the Western Balkans. This points to the fact that China sees the region as a backdoor to Europe, and an environment where partnerships can be sustained with significantly fewer political costs. Opaque funding arrangements and politically conditioned cooperation faces less scrutiny here than elsewhere in Europe. In this sense, the region functions as a bridge – geographically inside Europe yet politically and institutionally more open and flexible.

A Template Beyond the Balkans?

As the EU procrastinates over accession for the Western Balkan countries and enlargement fatigue persists, the governments in the region pursue multi-vector foreign policies. In this context, educational cooperation is framed as an opportunity rather than as a security risk. In addition, the EU lacks a clear “China conditionality” in its enlargement policy with the region and needs to do more to define under which conditions candidates are allowed to engage with China.

Despite these concerns, some analysts have pointed out that China’s economic diplomacy in the Western Balkans is less ambitious and less influential than feared. In the context of the Western Balkans’ uncertain political future, rather than investing heavily to consolidate its long-term influence in the region, China has adopted a flexible and opportunistic approach in which education diplomacy plays a key role. 

China is not alone in this, nor is Western Balkans the only region where China is testing its education diplomacy. Both the European Union and China leverage educational initiatives as instruments of soft power to expand their reach in the region. In Central Asia, much like in the Balkans, China is abandoning raw economic assertiveness and testing new tools, “learning to adapt” by fusing investment with education to maximize its impact in a fragmented region.

For China, the Western Balkans may represent a testing ground for a less centralized and more networked education diplomacy, which is more integrated with technology and statecraft. The classrooms of the Balkans may offer a preview of China’s shifting strategy based not only on projecting influence through infrastructure and loans, but also incrementally through exchanges, scholarships, and curricula. 

The key question for policymakers in Brussels and Washington is not whether such engagement will continue, but whether alternatives – funding, partnerships, safeguards – can be offered before China’s educational offerings turn into long-term influence that results in dependence.

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While Confucius Institutes are closing across parts of Western Europe, China is not retreating from Europe’s educational space but adapting to it, reshaping its institutional presence, and diversifying its channels for projecting influence. In the Western Balkans, Beijing is expanding its academic footprint through a more decentralized, adaptive, and politically embedded model of education diplomacy. In Serbia, a third Confucius Institute opened in 2024. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chinese-backed Sinology programs are among the few consistently achieving enrollment quotas. In Montenegro, academic cooperation has extended into artificial intelligence and cryptography, setting off alarms in Washington.

Taken together, these developments point to a broader shift in Beijing’s strategy in the region, where China has found a more welcoming political environment. The governments in the Western Balkans pursue multi-vector foreign policies and have less stringent regulations in terms of research security and limits to foreign funding in academia. This has allowed China to develop a more decentralized model of education diplomacy built on scholarships, dual-degree programs, corporate-sponsored training, and technology-linked research cooperation targeting the region’s underfunded universities. 

As the United States strengthens research security and the EU moves toward de-risking, China’s strategy in the Western Balkans may foreshadow how Beijing adapts its approach and tests it in other politically flexible and receptive regions.

Serbia: The Poster Child

The latest China Index report for 2024 ranks countries according to their exposure to China’s policies. Serbia retained 34th place in the ranking of 101 countries, the highest in the region, making it the key strategic partner and a poster child of cooperation with China in the region. Beijing enjoys a close relationship with President Aleksandar Vučić and a great deal of goodwill among the population. Thus it’s not surprising that Serbia has emerged as the regional hub of China’s education engagement. 

Serbia is China’s most advanced education partner in the Western Balkans, with three Confucius Institutes. Mandarin is an elective subject in over 60 public schools, and even a compulsory subject in some. This suggests a degree of normalization of Chinese linguistic and cultural presence.

Cooperation extends well beyond language teaching, with Chinese companies entering the educational space. Surveillance technology firm Dahua Technologies and tire manufacturer Linglong signed a cooperation agreement with the University of Kragujevac and established scholarship programs for Serbian students, respectively. Linking industrial investment with academic training reinforces China’s influence across sectors.

Rather than relying only on Confucius Institutes, which have been discredited in Western Europe, China is broadening its engagement to include municipalities and private enterprises in moving toward diffusion and obfuscation of its institutional footprint. 

A Chinese cultural center opened in 2021, built at the site of the former Chinese embassy in Belgrade. As the embassy was bombed during NATO’s 1999 intervention, memory politics intersect with educational diplomacy to further boost China’s legitimacy and popularity in Serbia.

Bosnia and Herzegovina: The Sandbox

If China is attracted to Serbia by strong political relations and favorable popular opinion, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s internal fragmentation and weak economic prospects create a captive and highly deregulated space to test its educational diplomacy.

China exploits the divided political landscape in Bosnia and Herzegovina to hedge its bets and maintain relationships with elites in both entities – the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, based in Sarajevo, and the Republika Srpska. In the latter, “the Sinology Department at the University of Eastern Sarajevo is the only department in the university with no shortage of students.” In 2011-2022, 97 students finished their undergraduate studies in the Chinese language, which is a large number for an entity with an estimated 1.1 million people.

Educational ties are reinforced through several scholarship programs, from degree-oriented programs to the China/UNESCO Great Wall Fellowship. The University of East Sarajevo has also signed an agreement with the University for International Studies in Jilin to provide dual degrees to all attending students. Such agreements deepen institutional dependency by tying academic advancement to Chinese partner institutions.

Montenegro: The Back Door

Montenegro’s case offers another angle of China’s education diplomacy: sector-specific and technology-linked cooperation. A tiny country of around 630,000 people, Montenegro hosts only one Confucius Institute, but in 2019 alone, 5,000 people enrolled in its courses. It has also sent more than 100 students and over 100 civil servants to China as part of exchange programs. This has been a notable success for China’s education diplomacy, allowing it to extend its influence to Montenegrin public administration. Some analysts have even claimed that Montenegro – rather than Serbia – is the regional leader in educational cooperation with China.

In Montenegro, just like elsewhere in the Balkans, Beijing promotes the creation of “Confucius Classrooms” at primary and secondary schools. These programs teach primary, secondary, and preschool children the Chinese language and culture through partnerships with Chinese institutions. In Montenegro, more than 700 students are involved in such courses. Due to claims that Confucius Classrooms could expose children to propaganda, there have been public protests against them in Canada and investigations into their work in Australia. 

At the private University of Donja Gorica, whose funders are reportedly close to former President Milo Đukanović, a “Tourism Confucius Classroom” was established in partnership with Beijing Union University in 2019. Its purpose is to strengthen cooperation and vocational education in Hotel Management and Tourism Management. 

Another partnership drew much sharper scrutiny. In June 2025, the University of Montenegro signed a memorandum of cooperation with China’s National Supercomputer Center in Jinan, operated by the National University of Defense Technology, overseen by the People’s Liberation Army and sanctioned by the U.S. Commerce Department. The agreement covers cryptography, artificial intelligence, and cybersecurity. 

Washington issued a public warning that such partnerships between Montenegro, a NATO member state, and China could pose risks of data leakage and knowledge transfers. The fact that the signatory of the memorandum, Rector of the University of Montenegro Vladimir Božović, received his doctorate in the United States in the field of mathematics and cryptography, only strengthened these concerns.

Albania and North Macedonia’s Avoidance and the Kosovo Exception

Compared to Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Montenegro, China’s educational presence in Albania and North Macedonia is significantly more modest. Albania hosts one Confucius Institute and several Confucius classrooms, but pushed back against stronger Chinese presence due to its aspirations of joining the EU and NATO. Albania-China relations therefore depend heavily on cooperation with Albanian media, cultural diplomacy, and tourism. In North Macedonia, Mandarin has not become embedded in the public school system on a large scale, and China’s educational visibility remains limited. 

The geography of China’s educational footprint in the Balkans contains one conspicuous absence: Kosovo. China does not recognize Kosovo’s independence and regards it as part of Serbia. Accordingly, there are no Confucius Institutes or official Chinese language programs, but Mandarin is an elective subject in over 60 public schools, and scholarships for further language study are provided by China. 

The Kosovo gap demonstrates that China’s educational outreach does not transcend geopolitical red lines – it reinforces them. China’s education diplomacy in the region follows recognition policy, underlining the strategic logic underpinning China’s outreach.

Decentralized Education Diplomacy for a Fragmented Region

Across the Western Balkans, China’s education diplomacy relies on heterogenous tools, including government scholarships, Confucius Institute grants, university-level agreements, short-term training courses, corporate-sponsored programs, and sector-specific research agreements. The shift in its approach reflects the lessons that China has learned from policy failures in the West. 

In the United States and parts of Western Europe, dozens of Confucius Institutes closed due to allegations of censorship, surveillance, and influence operations. Unlike Goethe Institutes and British Councils, Confucius Institutes are mostly located within host universities, giving them leverage over these institutions. In response, China sought to rebrand the institutes and create a more decentralised network of institutions through which to conduct its education diplomacy.

The EU is not immune to the offensive of China’s education diplomacy either, with the Central and Eastern EU member states particularly vulnerable given the financial constraints at even the leading universities. However, what distinguishes the Western Balkans is the scale of cooperation with China. 

Despite the fact that most countries in the region do not see Chinese funding as an alternative, but as an addition to EU funding, the region is seeing big investments. According to some estimates, more than half of China’s total investments in Europe have been in the Western Balkans. This points to the fact that China sees the region as a backdoor to Europe, and an environment where partnerships can be sustained with significantly fewer political costs. Opaque funding arrangements and politically conditioned cooperation faces less scrutiny here than elsewhere in Europe. In this sense, the region functions as a bridge – geographically inside Europe yet politically and institutionally more open and flexible.

A Template Beyond the Balkans?

As the EU procrastinates over accession for the Western Balkan countries and enlargement fatigue persists, the governments in the region pursue multi-vector foreign policies. In this context, educational cooperation is framed as an opportunity rather than as a security risk. In addition, the EU lacks a clear “China conditionality” in its enlargement policy with the region and needs to do more to define under which conditions candidates are allowed to engage with China.

Despite these concerns, some analysts have pointed out that China’s economic diplomacy in the Western Balkans is less ambitious and less influential than feared. In the context of the Western Balkans’ uncertain political future, rather than investing heavily to consolidate its long-term influence in the region, China has adopted a flexible and opportunistic approach in which education diplomacy plays a key role. 

China is not alone in this, nor is Western Balkans the only region where China is testing its education diplomacy. Both the European Union and China leverage educational initiatives as instruments of soft power to expand their reach in the region. In Central Asia, much like in the Balkans, China is abandoning raw economic assertiveness and testing new tools, “learning to adapt” by fusing investment with education to maximize its impact in a fragmented region.

For China, the Western Balkans may represent a testing ground for a less centralized and more networked education diplomacy, which is more integrated with technology and statecraft. The classrooms of the Balkans may offer a preview of China’s shifting strategy based not only on projecting influence through infrastructure and loans, but also incrementally through exchanges, scholarships, and curricula. 

The key question for policymakers in Brussels and Washington is not whether such engagement will continue, but whether alternatives – funding, partnerships, safeguards – can be offered before China’s educational offerings turn into long-term influence that results in dependence.

Dr. Urban Jakša is a researcher and analyst focusing on conflict, peace, and security in Southeastern and Eastern Europe. He currently heads the European Union Training Initiative (EUTI), which trains staff at EU CSDP civilian crisis management missions. He has a Ph.D. in Politics from the University of York.

China education diplomacy

China-Bosnia relations

China-Montenegro relations

China-Serbia relations

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