cross-posted from: https://scribe.disroot.org/post/10643258

In July 2026, China placed the Polish Wrocław University of Science and Technology and Vigo Photonics on its export control list – the first time Beijing has aimed such restrictions at Polish entities. The move was retaliation for the EU’s 21st sanctions package against Russia rather than a bilateral measure, and it is unlikely to change much. Warsaw had settled the direction of its China policy well before Beijing began naming Polish entities.

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The numbers explain why Poland has more at stake than most of its regional neighbors. In 2024, the country ran a trade deficit with China of roughly €31 billion. In 2025, China’s share of Polish imports climbed from 14.5 to 15.5 percent, with the value of Chinese goods growing more than 13 percent year-on-year. The trend has continued into 2026, though more slowly.

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Exposure on that scale would normally buy political influence. In Poland, it has not, and the reason is that the country’s China debate now sits predominantly within a broader security assessment in which Russia is the primary threat and China figures as part of the same problem, rather than as a separate commercial file to be managed on its own merits.

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The developments of September 2025 made this point clear. At the time, Poland temporarily closed its border with Belaruswithout visible hesitation, cutting a route carrying around 90 percent of China-EU rail freight, an estimated €25 billion a year. February 2026 brought a smaller version of a similar reflex, when the government banned Chinese vehicles from military facilities and barred personnel from connecting their phones to those cars’ systems.

The institutional architecture points the same way. Poland spends 4.8 percent of GDP on defense, the highest share in NATO. Warsaw has tightened screening of Chinese investment and its rules on high-risk 5G suppliers, and the updated cybersecurity act known as Lex Huawei is now in force, despite the Chinese company publicly challenging it as discriminatory at the draft stage.

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Taiwan Moves In

Where Beijing loses ground in Poland, Taipei gains it. In 2025, Poland took around 60 percent of Taiwan’s drone exports, making it the world’s largest buyer of Taiwanese drones at the time. Defense-industrial ties were further formalized at the International Defence Industry Exhibition in Kielce in September 2025, where Taipei, Warsaw, and Kyiv signed a trilateral drone agreement. An important symbol of this cooperation came a month later, when a senior Taiwanese general appeared in full uniform at the Warsaw Security Forum.

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Taiwanese investment may continue to be the preferred option as it raises fewer security objections in Warsaw, arrives with fewer political conditions attached, and reduces Polish dependence on China – a country that keeps Russia’s war economy running. Chinese trade offers none of that, whatever its scale and affordability.

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Working-level contact continues regardless. The 8th Poland-China Strategic Dialogue, held in Beijing in June 2026, discussed a possible high-level visit to mark the 10th anniversary of the comprehensive strategic partnership and set out rules for Polish poultry exports. But less than two months later came the export-control listings that included Polish entities.

That sequence captures the gist of Polish-Chinese relations relatively well. Beijing keeps the diplomatic machinery running while presenting the restrictions as aimed at the EU as a whole rather than at any country in particular. Warsaw keeps the same machinery running while treating China as an integral part of a security problem rather than a trade file to be handled on its own terms.

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Poland judges its partners by what they contribute to its position vis-à-vis Russia, and on that measure China, which keeps Russia’s war economy running, arguably has little to offer. As long as China’s partnership with Russia holds, this judgment is likely to remain.

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