After Trump and Putin, Vučić is also arriving in Beijing.
The five-day visit of Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić comes after a decade of strengthening relations with China.
It is precisely with China that Serbia is building "steel friendship", as officials from both countries call the cooperation between them.
As a candidate country for membership in the European Union, Serbia has been increasingly guided by China in recent years.
Vučić will stay in China for a five-day visit, from May 24 to 28, at the invitation of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.
Former senior US State Department official Thomas Countryman told Radio Free Europe that for Vučić this visit has more than just symbolic significance.
"Beijing's continued support is important to it, both economically and politically, while it doesn't cost China much," Countryman said.
Cooperation has expanded from the economic and infrastructural fields to the military, so Serbia, as the only European country, has been supplied with weapons from China in recent years.
Last year, members of special forces from the Chinese and Serbian armies held their first joint military exercise in China.
Serbia is also part of the international "Belt and Road" initiative, which China launched in 2013 with the aim of developing new trade routes and markets for Chinese exports.
The goal of Serbia's foreign policy is EU membership, but at the same time its foreign policy is based on balancing between West and East.
Countryman assessed that Vučić has been relatively successful in trying to strike a balance between Washington, Brussels, Moscow and Beijing, at least by not "overly antagonizing any of these parties."
"However, this has come at the price of weakening Serbia's aspirations for membership in the European Union, especially due to close and non-transparent relations with Russia," he said.
Serbia is stagnating in European integration, among other things due to the inconsistency of its foreign policy with that of the EU.
With a history of maintaining good relations with Russia, Belgrade continues to refuse to join EU sanctions on Moscow over its invasion of Ukraine.
What does a trip to Beijing bring?
Stefan Vlladisavllev, program director of the non-governmental BFPE Foundation for Responsible Societies, told Radio Free Europe that Vučić has traveled to Beijing mainly in multilateral formats.
"This will be an opportunity, at a high level, not only to harmonize future mutual policy, but also to concretize certain forms of cooperation," he said.
On the eve of the visit, Vučić stated that the parties had agreed on investments worth 1 billion euros.
On May 21, he told Serbian public broadcaster RTS that at least 33 agreements would be signed, as well as agreements and contracts that “will not be less than 30.”
He also added that he will sign two major joint declarations with China, but did not provide details about these documents.
Vučić also announced that there will be discussions about the production of chips and humanoid robots in Serbia.
Vladisavlev stressed that the importance of the visit will depend on the agreements that will be signed.
"We need to see if they will be linked to concrete projects, if they will be at the level of memorandums of cooperation or concrete contracts that oblige the implementation of projects," he said.
Asked what can be expected from the Serbian president's visit to China, former US State Department official Thomas Countryman replied: "very little."
According to Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Guo Jiakun, Vučić will hold separate meetings with President Xi Jinping and Premier Li Qiang.
He told reporters on May 20 that Serbia is the first European country to build a "community of shared future in the new era" with China and that it is an important partner of China in Southeast Europe.
The Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman stated that China sees President Vučić's visit as an opportunity to build a "strong steel friendship", to expand cooperation that is beneficial to both sides, to enrich cultural exchanges and multilateral coordination.
China and Serbia established a strategic partnership in August 2009.
During the Chinese president's first visit to Belgrade in June 2016, the Joint Declaration on the Establishment of a Comprehensive Strategic Partnership was signed.
During Xi Jinping's second visit to Belgrade in May 2024, the Joint Declaration on Building a "Serbia-China Community with a Shared Future in the New Era" was signed.
Trump-Putin-Vučić symbolism?
This is not Vučić's first visit to Beijing, but he describes it as the crowning achievement of his political career.
This is also due to the fact that, as he said, he is traveling to Xi after the President of the United States, Donald Trump, and the President of Russia, Vladimir Putin.
Vucic will arrive in China a week after Trump's visit and just a few days after Putin's.
However, Stefan Vladisavlev assessed that this was a simple coincidence and emphasized that the topics of the talks with Vučić will be different from those the Chinese held with Trump and Putin.
"Trump had the idea of easing tensions in bilateral relations, while with Putin it was about deepening bilateral cooperation and the focus was energy."
In the case of Serbia, according to him, it will be a bilateral cooperation agreement between the two states.
"As a result, the impact they will have on the geopolitical dimension will remain limited," Vladisavllev assessed.
Serbia and China also signed a Free Trade Agreement in 2023, which Serbian officials have described as an event of "historic importance" for Serbia.
From building roads and railways to buying weapons
Billions of dollars of Chinese investment are flowing into Serbia, while infrastructure projects are being built with Chinese loans.
The construction of the Belgrade-Budapest high-speed railway, which is part of the Chinese strategic project "Belt and Road", is also under development.
This particular project is under investigation by the Serbian Organized Crime Prosecutor's Office on suspicion of corruption.
The investigation was opened after the collapse of a concrete shelter at the Novi Sad Railway Station on November 1, 2024, which killed 16 people, an event that sparked massive protests in Serbia.
It is not known whether the responsibility of Chinese investors is being investigated, while two former ministers of the Serbian Government are suspects.
All of Serbia's infrastructure projects with China have been contracted without tenders, with direct agreements between governments.
Brussels has warned several times about the lack of transparency in these agreements.
At the same time, Serbia's debt to China is also growing.
The majority of loans are taken for infrastructure projects, roads, bridges and railways, mainly from the Chinese bank EXIM (Export-Import Bank of China).
This bank, according to data from the Public Debt Administration of the Serbian Ministry of Finance, is among Serbia's largest creditors.
Authorities in Belgrade have justified receiving loans from China, instead of financing from EU institutions, to which Serbia aims to join, by the fact that Chinese loans are "faster" due to easier procedures.
Financing from EU funds would require compliance with European procedures, which include transparency and tendering.
According to data from the Republican Statistical Office of Serbia, trade exchange with China in 2025 reached 8.29 billion euros.
Of this, exports from Serbia were 1.87 billion euros, while imports were 6.42 billion euros.
Chinese companies have taken over loss-making former state-owned giants – the Bor Mining and Metallurgical Combine and the Smederevo Steel Factory, which employ thousands of people.
Chinese mining giant Zijin Mining tops the list of the largest exporters from Serbia, while Chinese group HBIS took over the almost closed steel factory in 2016.
While local environmental activists warn of the pollution of vital resources – air, water and land – Chinese companies have rejected these accusations.
The HBIS company was fined in 2024 for air pollution.
Among the latest major Chinese investments is the Linglong automobile tire factory, which has also been linked to allegations of pollution and forced labor.
Due to allegations of the use of forced labor, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) issued an order in December 2025 banning the import of tires manufactured in Linglong to Serbia.
Belgrade's eyes from Beijing
"Serbia views the Chinese development model with admiration," Vučić wrote on Instagram on May 20 after meeting with Chinese Ambassador Li Ming.
"For Serbia, it is of particular importance to build strong partnerships with friendly countries that respect our independence and the right to our own way," he said.
Belgrade and Beijing agree on key political issues for both countries.
Vladisavllev from the BFPE Foundation recalls that both sides often emphasize in statements the need to respect territorial integrity and sovereignty.
"Serbia is doing this because of Kosovo, which China does not recognize as an independent state, and for China this issue is Taiwan."
Authorities in Belgrade support the Chinese position that Taiwan is Chinese territory, while Taiwan considers itself a sovereign state.
Vučić, during his visit to China in October 2023, said he was proud that Serbia had not joined any declaration against this country.
Relations with China have strengthened since the Serbian Progressive Party (SNS) came to power in Serbia 12 years ago.
In an effort to get closer to China, Vučić has also spoken in Chinese, when in December 2019, through a video message, he announced in Chinese that he would visit the country in April of the following year.
The Serbian President was last in China in September 2025, when he participated in the military parade on the occasion of Victory Day. /REL
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