The paper emphasizes the marginality of China’s economic presence in East Central Europe (ECE) and the lack of substantial societal support for closer ties with China. Instead, individual leaders and elite groups have played a decisive role in initiating stronger ties. In this sense, there is a clear dichotomy between illiberal elites’ inclination in ECE countries to cultivate cordial relations with China, and local populations’ inclination to perceive China as an ‘illiberal other’ and remain committed to the liberal-democratic achievements of post-communist transition. The paper argues that this inconsistency informs the ephemeral nature of these countries’ exposure to China since it is contingent on the elite-level transient political dynamics and as such, is not structural in practice. The paper identifies three interconnected factors of the region’s exposure to China. Firstly, there is a strategic competition of development models between the EU and China, characterized by a divergence between Europe’s value-driven model and China’s value-deprived approach. Secondly, being caught in between quintessentially divergent development models, several ECE countries, experiencing an illiberal turn and lacking resilient state capacity, have developed a political-economic strategy of pivoting to the ‘geopolitical East’. The eastward turn in foreign policies of illiberal ECE countries implies that securing a prosperous future is contingent upon aligning themselves with China as a new power center. Thirdly, there is the phenomenon of elite capture in illiberal ECE countries, which has created a favorable context for China to establish regional influence.