Authoritarian economic soft power: the case of Russian and Chinese investments in Central Europe

The paper deals with the economic soft power strategies of authoritarian countries in the Visegrad region: the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Based on the material of authoritarian countries, state-owned enterprises and investments, economic soft power is necessary for the investment to be accepted and not perceived as a security issue. Based on empirical material, it concludes that even if the countries’ overall soft power ranking is low, they can overcome such an obstacle through cooperation with populist leaders. Even scaling down their presence for economic and non-economic reasons, Russia and China still leave the room for a return open, as the investment relies on a populist type of ruler, not a specific politician. It uses two case studies, one for Sputnik V as the economic soft power creation strategy and the case of CITIC departure for the scaling down presence strategy.