Vucic flew to Beijing for a $1.1bn Chinese investment, while Belgrade burned

Tens of thousands of people protested in Belgrade demanding early elections, accountability for the November 2024 Novi Sad railway-station collapse that killed 16 people, and an end to state capture. Riot police used pepper spray, and the state-owned railway canceled trains to and from Belgrade to limit protest attendance. President Aleksandar Vučić blamed “foreign powers” and then traveled to Beijing to sign more than 20 cooperation agreements with Xi Jinping. The agreements included a $1.1bn Chinese package for AI infrastructure, robotics joint ventures, and electric-vehicle manufacturing in Serbia. The package adds to existing Chinese-linked projects such as a $1.5bn highway contract, defense-adjacent partnerships, and Huawei’s telecom footprint in state infrastructure. The timing suggests the government is demonstrating options beyond Brussels while protests are ongoing.

"On Saturday, tens of thousands of Serbians filled the centre of Belgrade in what police estimated as a 34,300-person rally demanding early elections, accountability for the November 2024 Novi Sad railway-station collapse that killed 16 people, and an end to what the country's student movement has spent eighteen months calling state capture. Riot police pepper-sprayed demonstrators. The state-owned railway cancelled all trains to and from Belgrade to keep protesters from arriving. President Aleksandar Vučić blamed "foreign powers"."

"Three days later he was in Beijing, signing more than 20 cooperation agreements with Xi Jinping. Among them, a $1.1bn Chinese investment package covering artificial intelligence infrastructure, robotics joint ventures, and electric-vehicle manufacturing capacity on Serbian soil. This is on top of a $1.5bn highway contract already under construction with Shandong Hi-Speed Group, the various defence-adjacent partnerships, and the Huawei telecoms footprint that has been quietly entrenching itself in Serbian state infrastructure for the better part of a decade."

"The sequencing is not accidental. A government facing the largest sustained protest movement in the country's post-Milošević history is choosing this week, with the cameras still in central Belgrade, to demonstrate that its strategic options do not run only through Brussels. The European Union is, by stated policy, supposed to care about both of these things. Serbia is an EU candidate state. The accession framework gives Brussels formal levers over judicial independence, media freedom, electoral integrity, and exactly the kind of third-country technology dependency that a $1.1bn Chinese AI-and-robotics package builds."

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