After Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s recent visit to India, the first by a Polish PM in 16 years, the India-Polish “strategic partnership” is expected to get stronger through better economic and defence cooperation.
This comes two years after Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited Poland in 2024, which was the first visit by an Indian PM in 45 years, during which the relationship was elevated to “strategic partnership”.
But the ties are improving against the backdrop of an important development — Poland distancing itself from China on many levels.
Before India, Poland had raised its relationship with China to a “strategic partnership” in the 2010s. But Poland has moved away from China due to the trade being one-sided and the Russia-Ukraine war, in which Poland sees China as an enabler, mirroring the EU’s trajectory, according to experts.
Old values, new avenues: On India-Poland ties
In January, the EU released a draft proposal to phase out components and equipment from “high-risk” suppliers in critical sectors, as part of revisions to the Cybersecurity Act, a move criticised by China’s Huawei, which is set to be among the companies affected, Reuters reported. In February, the Polish Army barred Chinese-made vehicles from entering military facilities due to concerns that their onboard sensors could be used to collect sensitive data, as per Reuters.
An official from the WB Group, one of the largest private defence manufacturing companies of Poland, told The Hindu that they do not use Chinese critical components. “We use chips from friendly countries like South Korea,” the official said. A Polish Defence Ministry source also confirmed this development.
‘China shock 2.0’
In July this year, a study published by the Centre for Eastern Studies (OSW), a Polish government research institute, and the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers (ZPP), titled ‘Poland–Europe–China: Cooperation or Dependency Trap?’ warned that “China shock 2.0” is hitting Europe’s industrial core, including Poland.
The source of this pressure is not simple market competition, but China’s consistent, state-led industrial strategy, as per the study. In 2025, value added lost from European industry to China was $87 billion. Of this, $11.4 billion was borne by Poland, and about 45,000 jobs in Poland are at risk, mainly in batteries, automotive parts, household appliances, and steel, as per the study.
It is against this backdrop that Łukasiewicz – ITECH, a research network under the Polish government, held its inaugural conference in Warsaw in October on its ‘Asian Programme’ to strengthen Poland’s cooperation with Asian countries. The initial countries chosen for it are Taiwan, South Korea and India.
The ultimate goal of the programme is to move beyond general declarations of international cooperation and towards concrete projects, partnerships and recommendations that support the development of Poland’s “innovation capacity”, as per the institute.
During Mr. Tusk’s visit, representatives of the institute were in India.
Pawel Marczewski, Director of the Department of Strategy and Analysis, Łukasiewicz – ITECH, said the main aim of the programme is to learn from the experiences of like-minded Asian countries about how they support their innovation ecosystem and commercialisation of technological innovation.
“But also, a pretty important factor is to be independent of China. For instance, how to build independence from China in terms of critical minerals and critical technologies. China has completely restricted the supply of critical minerals for the European defence sector, including Poland,” Mr. Marczewski said.
But this was not always the case. Dominik Mierzejewski, associate professor, Department of Asian Studies, University of Lodz, Poland, said that in 1997, the then-Polish President visited China, and it was sort of an opening of doors for bilateral relations.
“The very big signal was in 2011, when we signed a strategic partnership. In December 2011, the first document was signed and the second was signed in 2016,” he said.
Mr. Mierzejewski said that in 2012 there was the “16+1” cooperation (16 Central and Eastern European [CEE] nations and China) and in 2015, Poland was one of the first countries from Europe to be part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) of China. “So we thought the trade deficit would be narrowed by policies from Beijing. However, it did not materialise. And particularly this disappointment came from a lack of Chinese investments in Poland,” he said.
‘India fever’
Commenting on the current state of the relationship, he said, Poland started distancing from China from February 2022, “when Russia started its war with Ukraine”, he said. “We need to recognise that Polish foreign policy towards China is based on the fact that Poland is a member of the EU. For the EU, there is a sort of growing disappointment with China. It is not just Poland, but in Germany, France, Italy, etc., there is a structural mismatch between Beijing’s approach to international relations and European expectations,” Mr. Mierzejewski said.
“Not only in Poland, but in the whole EU, the ties with India are getting closer. What I experienced in Brussels, Paris, or Berlin is that there is India fever. Previously, we had China fever. So, this is the current context. It is important for the EU to learn a lesson from its relationship with China,” he added.
Adam Burakowski, former Polish Ambassador to India, said Poland’s relationship with China was the closest around 2016. “Now Poland is politically not that close to China, but the economic relationship continues. The bilateral trade with China is about $60 billion, but it is very one-sided with around $58 billion being Chinese exports to Poland. We would like to rebalance it.”
But Mr. Burakowski said that the visit by the Polish PM to India was more about economic ties with India. “With the India-EU Free Trade Agreement (FTA) to be ratified soon, the focus of the current visit was mainly economic,” he said. Mr. Burakowski said the bilateral trade between the countries now stands at around $6 billion and both the governments are working to increase it to $10 billion.
(The writer was in Poland at the invitation of the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs)
