So it came as little surprise that at the recent summer conference of the World Economic Forum, held in the Chinese port city of Tianjin, Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto sounded more aligned with Beijing than with his European peers. “Political leaders in Europe … are interested in so-called decoupling or de-risking. Which, to be honest, according to our understanding, would be a brutal suicide.”

He may as well have directly called out Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission, one of the European Union’s most hard-line voices on China. It was her speech in March to the Mercator Institute, a Brussels-based think tank (sanctioned by the Chinese government), that first popularized the term “de-risking,” which has now been adopted as the more sophisticated alternative to “decoupling” throughout Europe and even in Washington. Rather than cutting China completely off (as suggested by decoupling), von der Leyen talked about “stress-testing our relationship to see where the greatest threats lie concerning our resilience, long-term prosperity and security.”

Between Szijjarto and von der Leyen lies a gulf of opinion about China within the continent. Across the West, concern is rising about China. In 2019, most European Union member states adopted the language of China as both a rival and partner. That has now been superseded by a general agreement that there is a need to de-risk. Yet what those words really mean is disputed. Some leaders share Szijjarto’s opinion that any de-risking would be fatally damaging to their own countries and feel that the hard-line narrative of rolling China back comes from Washington diktat rather than from their own national interests. Others have been radicalized by Russia’s assault on Ukraine into a harder position on Beijing, even as China tries to diplomatically distance itself from its long-term partner in Moscow.

In contrast to France and Germany, some of Beijing’s fiercest critics are found in Central and Eastern Europe. Lithuania has allowed Taiwan to open a representative office in Vilnius and in turn recalled its ambassador from Beijing; Poland and Romania have banned Huawei; and new Czech President Petr Pavel became the first EU head of state to directly talk with the Taiwanese president. He has also pledged to visit Taiwan.

It wasn’t long ago that these countries had competed to be China’s gateway into Europe. In the aftermath of the 2007-09 financial crisis, China offered them an attractive alternative source of investment and trade. Some were also engaged in political disputes with the EU machinery (as Poland has been over matters of judicial independence in the country), whereby closeness to China became leverage over Brussels. So in 2012, the 16+1 was formed, a loose economic grouping of Central and Eastern European countries, later becoming the 17+1 with the entry of Greece. Some of them, such as Poland and Hungary, went on to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative, too. China promised new bridges, railways, and more open access to the Chinese market.

Sources in the Polish and Czech diplomatic missions tell me that their countries have also been let down by the lack of Chinese investment. Analysis by the Central and Eastern European Center for Asian Studies on this question found that, remarkably, eight of the original 16+1 countries saw no Chinese infrastructure projects by 2020. (This is typical of the Belt and Road Initiative’s modus operandi, where Chinese contractors often made big promises to try to win political favor in Beijing, where the BRI was tightly associated with Xi’s leadership, and then simply never delivered them.)

And for projects that are delivered (or at least started), concerns linger over cost, quality, and debt. The infamous highway to nowhere in Montenegro, also a member of the 16+1, is cited by officials in other Central and Eastern European countries as a reason to doubt the Belt and Road Initiative. Designed to connect the country’s impoverished north and bolster trade with nearby Serbia, only a quarter of the 165-kilometer (103 miles) highway has been finished. Yet already, the project has racked up a bill of nearly 1 billion euros (about $1.1 billion)–almost a quarter of the country’s GDP–and raised questions over whether it can really be finished. “Every country has a highway story,” a Polish diplomat told me.

And as with BRI projects across the global south, China’s courting of often corrupt and divisive politicians means that Beijing unwittingly inserts itself into domestic political debates in recipient countries. The most controversial leaders–such as Orban–are often the ones most eager. When these leaders leave office, Chinese companies and projects inevitably lose a champion, which is exactly what has happened after Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras was replaced with Kyriakos Mitsotakis and the Czech Republic voted out President Milos Zeman in favor of Pavel.

As the Central and Eastern European countries become more critical to Beijing, they’ve also become more friendly with Taipei.

But the true turning point came with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. China’s rise and unwavering stance on Taiwan had already unsettled some post-Soviet states, including Lithuania, reminding them of another Communist leviathan. But it’s China’s prevarication on Ukraine that really cemented the likeness to Russia. Beijing has still not explicitly criticized Putin, and has failed to make any real moves to mediate in the crisis despite imploration from Ukraine’s regional allies, such as Poland. The eventual 12-point peace plan and the appointment of a Chinese “peace envoy” came more than a year after the invasion began, and there are real questions over whether they don’t serve Russian interests better. Then there was the car-crash interview by China’s ambassador to France, Lu Shaye, who in April said: “Ex-Soviet countries don’t have an effective status in international law.” By the time Chinese officialdom walked back the answer, it was too late.

The 17+1 became 16 when Lithuania left in 2021 and is now down to 14, as Estonia and Latvia have also both left. It looks like the Czech Republic, under Pavel, will be the next to go. As the Central and Eastern European countries become more critical to Beijing, they’ve also become more friendly with Taipei. Lithuania and Taiwan now have representative offices in each other’s capital, with the former now the seventh-largest market for online shoppers from Taiwan. Poland, the Czech Republic, and Lithuania were among those to donate vaccines to Taipei during the coronavirus pandemic. There is shared solidarity with another small, young democracy on the doorstep of another belligerent giant.

Other issues have dented China’s image across Europe. The full extent of its mass-scale internment of the Uyghur minority in Xinjiang has shocked and appalled, evoking memories of the Holocaust. Germany’s Green party has been particularly vocal in criticizing China’s ongoing human rights abuses, particularly in the form of Reinhard B?tikofer, a Green member of the European Parliament who has been sanctioned by Beijing. There was also the measurable impact of COVID-19–a 2021 poll from the Central European Institute of Asian Studies found that most respondents associated China primarily with COVID-19, with almost half of Polish respondents believing the virus was not only lab-made, but spread deliberately.