Georgia’s Upgraded Partnership With China: A Louder Signal, An Empty Promise

On June 9, marking the 34th anniversary of diplomatic relations between Georgia and China, something notable happened, or rather, something notably quiet happened. There were no handshakes, no joint press conferences, no smiling leaders posed before flags. Instead, the Chinese embassy in Georgia published a set of letters exchanged between President Xi Jinping and Georgian Dream’s handpicked president, Mikheil Kavelashvili, announcing that the two countries had upgraded their relationship to a “comprehensive strategic partnership.”

For Georgian Dream, this was presented as a diplomatic triumph. Prime Minister Irakli Kobakhidze followed with a briefing in which he declared the previous strategic partnership agreement with the United States, halted by Washington in 2024 in response to Georgia’s democratic backsliding, had been “just an agreement on paper,” while the partnership with China represented something real and substantive. He went further, describing China as “the only peaceful superpower,” a barely veiled swipe at Washington.

But a closer look at the record suggests the opposite is true.

A Promotion Without a Raise

China has established over 80 strategic partnerships globally, organized into a hierarchy of tiers. Georgia’s original 2023 agreement represented the lowest rung of this ladder. The new “comprehensive” designation is a step up in nomenclature, but neither side has published the text of the new agreement. No new framework documents have been shared, no fresh cooperation agenda announced. Based on available evidence, the upgrade appears to be a rebranding rather than a renegotiation, a louder label on the same bottle.

This matters because, as I documented in a previous analysis for The Diplomat, the original 2023 strategic partnership produced remarkably little. Chinese FDI in Georgia fell from $98 million in 2023 to just $29 million in 2024. China did not break into Georgia’s top 10 sources of foreign direct investment. Georgian exports to China declined. Beijing abstained from voting on Georgia’s U.N. resolution supporting the return of internally displaced persons from Russian-occupied territories, not once, but twice, in 2024 and 2025.

By the first quarter of 2026, Chinese FDI accounts for just 4.6 percent of total foreign direct investment in Georgia. China does not appear in Georgia’s top five export markets. In overall trade terms, it trails Turkiye, the United States, and Russia. These are not the numbers of a deepening strategic relationship. They are the numbers of a peripheral trading partner dressed up in diplomatic language.

Tallying the “Achievements”

Kobakhidze cited a list of bilateral accomplishments in his briefing, and each deserves scrutiny.

Tourism figures were presented as a headline success: following the visa-free regime introduced in 2024, Chinese tourist visits rose 83 percent in 2024 and 44 percent in 2025. These are real increases. But in absolute terms, the numbers remain modest, roughly 128,000 Chinese visitors out of nearly 8 million total arrivals in 2025. China is not yet a significant driver of Georgia’s tourism economy.

The updated Free Trade Agreement was touted as another milestone. Yet the original FTA between Georgia and China has been in place since 2016. A decade on, it has not produced transformative results. The 2025 update was a technical revision, not a structural overhaul. There is no clear reason to expect the update to do what the original agreement did not.

In education and cultural exchange, the cooperation cited by Kobakhidze largely reproduces arrangements that predate the strategic partnership. Scholarships for Georgian students in China, academic exchanges, cultural programs – all of these were in place before 2023 and have seen only marginal expansion since.

There has been some visible progress in aviation. Three Chinese carriers have begun operating routes to Georgia, modestly improving connectivity. This is a genuine, if limited, development. But progress in air transport, taken alone, does not amount to a comprehensive strategic realignment.

And then there is Anaklia. The deep-sea port on Georgia’s Black Sea coast, long a geopolitical focal point, once a target of American investment interest, was awarded to a Chinese-led consortium. This was cited at the time as the most concrete signal of Beijing’s strategic interest in Georgia’s logistics potential and the Middle Corridor. More than two years after that award was finalized, not a single shovel has broken ground. No investment has materialized. The project remains frozen, its future as ambiguous as ever. If Anaklia is the flagship of the China-Georgia strategic partnership, it is a flagship that has yet to leave port.

Beyond economics, the political returns on this partnership have been equally thin. China has not offered Georgia meaningful diplomatic backing where it counts. At the United Nations, Beijing once again abstained just days ago on the resolution concerning displaced persons from Abkhazia and South Ossetia. 

When China celebrated the 80th anniversary of Victory Day with a major military parade last October, Georgia was not among the nations invited to send a delegation, a notable absence given the fanfare surrounding the bilateral partnership. There have been no high-level meetings between presidents or prime ministers either over past two years. The relationship has produced few, if any, deliverables on the international stage that Georgia could point to as genuine diplomatic wins.

China’s most tangible political gesture toward the Georgian Dream government remains what it was in 2024: one of only six states that formally congratulated Kavelashvili on his contested election. That symbolic act mattered to Georgian Dream. But symbolism is not strategy.

The announcement of the upgraded partnership did not occur in a vacuum. It came one day after the United States House of Representatives passed H.R. 7668, the Countering China’s Control of the Caucasus Act, with bipartisan support. If passed by the Congress, the legislation will require the executive branch to produce a detailed assessment of Russian and Chinese intelligence activities and influence networks operating in Georgia, the areas of cooperation between Moscow and Beijing within the country, and a broader American strategic approach toward Tbilisi.

The timing is almost certainly not coincidental. Georgian Dream has demonstrated a consistent pattern of using its relationship with China not to build something, but to signal something — to the West, to domestic audiences, and to Washington in particular. The announcement of a comprehensive strategic partnership with Beijing, arriving the morning after a bipartisan American vote expressing alarm over Chinese and Russian influence in the country, reads less as a diplomatic milestone and more as a deliberate provocation, or at minimum, a carefully placed reminder.

To understand what Georgia is actually doing, it helps to situate its behavior within the logic of small-state hedging. Caught between great powers and facing increasing isolation from its traditional Western partners due to its democratic backsliding, Georgian Dream has adopted a dual-track posture: maintaining enough formal commitment to Euro-Atlantic integration to avoid complete rupture, while cultivating just enough proximity to China and by extension Russia’s sphere to serve as a credible threat of deeper pivot.

This is a strategy aimed at preserving Georgian Dream’s political leverage against Western pressure, not maximizing economic outcomes. The implicit message to Brussels and Washington is consistent: push us too hard on democratic standards, and we have other options. 

Domestically, the calculus is equally straightforward. Georgian Dream governs a country where polling consistently shows strong public support for EU and NATO membership. The party’s anti-Western tilt has driven sustained street protests and a deep legitimacy crisis. In this context, a high-profile partnership with a major global power, even one that delivers little in practice, allows the government to project an image of diplomatic relevance, international standing, and alternative options. “We have superpower friends” is a more useful domestic message than “we have been isolated by the West.”

Beijing’s motivations are more patient and more structural. China invests relatively little in this partnership, no major infrastructure commitments, no significant FDI, no diplomatic capital at the U.N., while maintaining a presence in a country that sits at the intersection of the South Caucasus, the Black Sea, and the Middle Corridor connecting China to Europe. Whether or not Anaklia ever gets built, China holds the concession. Whether or not the partnership produces trade, Beijing retains the relationship.

For China, the upgrade to comprehensive strategic partnership costs almost nothing and preserves optionality. If Georgia’s Western alignment weakens further, if the Middle Corridor grows in strategic importance, if Russian influence in the region recedes or expands, Beijing has positioned itself to respond to any of these scenarios without having made commitments that would constrain it. The comprehensive strategic partnership is, from China’s perspective, a low-cost option on a potentially valuable future asset.

Almost three years after Georgia’s original strategic partnership with China, and now with a freshly upgraded comprehensive version to point to, the ledger remains nearly blank. Chinese investment is marginal. Diplomatic support is absent where it matters. The flagship infrastructure project sits idle. The partnership’s most concrete output has been a modest uptick in tourism and the rhetorical ammunition it provides to a government under siege from its own democratic record.

The June 9 announcement was a political communication, addressed simultaneously to Western partners who have grown increasingly alarmed and to domestic audiences who need reassurance that Georgia is not alone.

Whether this gambit will buy Georgian Dream the breathing room it seeks, or accelerate the very Western disengagement it is meant to deter, remains the central question of Georgian foreign policy. What is clear is that the upgrade in diplomatic nomenclature changes very little on the ground, and that Beijing, characteristically, is in no hurry for it to.