Serbian state officials were in China five years ago (just like they are today, attending the Belt and Road conference). Back then they signed agreements and announced investments, just like they do today. We kept track of how many promises and agreements materialized in the meantime.
“When you cross Pupin’s bridge on the left, in the next couple of years, we are going to have a huge business park, spanning 320 hectares, where close to 1,000 Chinese companies will set up their business,” the current Finance Minister, Sinišaa Mali, said in Beijing five years ago.
So, we went to check out the location that Minister Mali mentioned in 2018. We turned left from Pupin’s bridge, but we found empty fields instead of a huge business park. There is no trace of the Serbian-Chinese industrial park in Borča. We only found an old, abandoned livestock farm.
In March of this year, during his guest TV appearance at Radio and Television of Serbia (RTS), Finance Minister Siniša Mali, said that the construction of the business park was halted due to the coronavirus pandemic. But the pandemic happened in 2020 and the construction of the park was supposed to start in 2018.
The same year, following his meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping, the Serbian President asked his Chinese counterpart for China to help Serbia make a prototype of a flying car (the Chinese officially launched the flying car in 2022).
From that moment onwards, no flying cars are gracing Serbian skies, although an animation of a flying car was made as part of the Digital Future of Serbia campaign.
Another failed plan of our government is the export of pig’s legs and heads to China, which was supposed to be a big export deal. N1 contacted the biggest meat companies in Serbia and all of them said that nobody from the government approached them regarding exporting pig’s feet and heads to date although Serbian officials claimed in 2018 that this was “a done deal with China”.
The phantom cooperation with China yielded yet another failed investment deal – a Chinese COVID-19 vaccine factory where production was supposed to be launched in April 2022.
“This is a big undertaking for our country. We will produce 30 million vaccine doses a year and we will subsequently raise the production capacity to 40 million vaccines,” Vučić said in September 2021.
The factory is still a pipe dream although Serbia has invested 47 million euros so far in its construction. Today, the factory is overgrown with weeds and is completely empty. Out of 180 people who were supposed to be employed there, we found only one man on the site who was perusing the building.
Instead, Serbia keeps borrowing from China and the country’s debt keeps growing year-on-year, i.e. it has increased 12 times in the last 10 years, from 305 million to 3.7 billion euros, the data collated by the National Bank of Serbia (NBS) show.
Most of the debt has been generated from loans that the Serbian government took from the Chinese Export-Import Bank which currently makes up 8.4 percent of Serbia’s total external debt. This means that for every 100 euros owed to foreign creditors, the country owes 8 euros to China.
(N1, 18.10.2023)