Chinese Migrants Increasingly Turn To Balkan Route To Reach Europe

BLAZUJ, Bosnia-Herzegovina -- After first flying from China to Serbia and then traveling by bus to neighboring Bosnia-Herzegovina, two young Chinese men are weighing entering the European Union through Croatia.

Yong and Chen have traveled along the so-called Balkan route for migrants , joining thousands of asylum seekers from the Middle East, South Asia, and Africa who are fleeing war, poverty, and repression in the hope of starting a new life inside the EU.

They're also among a growing cohort of fellow Chinese nationals who have increasingly looked to take advantage of visa-free entry in Serbia and Bosnia to then enter the EU and claim asylum in Western Europe.

RFE/RL is using pseudonyms for Yong and Chen and withholding certain details about the men, both of whom are in their early 20s. The two spoke to RFE/RL at the Blazuj migrant camp outside the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo, where they met after traveling separately from China.

Yong is a native of China's Henan Province, where he worked as a food delivery driver. Chen was a cook at a restaurant in Jiangsu Province.

Yong told RFE/RL he is currently running out of money and isn't sure how he would make the perilous crossing into Croatia, an EU member since 2013.

"I might stay here and find a job, earn some money," he said. "Maybe I'll look for work in a shop. I could work as a vendor."

Escaping Surveillance, High Youth Unemployment

According to data from Frontex, the European Border and Coast Guard Agency, 482 Chinese nationals were caught making illegal crossings along the Balkan route in the first nine months of 2025. That number is likely to rise before the end of the year, with four groups totaling more than 50 Chinese nationals stopped in recent months.

Some of those crossings have been deadly. One attempt resulted in the drowning of a Chinese citizen when a boat full of migrants capsized after trying to cross the Danube River between Serbia and Croatia in October. At least 10 other Chinese migrants who were on the boat survived.

More than 1 million Chinese nationals sought asylum abroad between 2012 and 2024, according to data from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), driven in part by growing surveillance and censorship since Chinese leader Xi Jinping came to power in 2012 and high youth unemployment rates and stagnant wages in recent years.

This period has seen growing Chinese diaspora communities in places like Amsterdam, Bangkok, Dubai, and Tokyo. But many from lower middle-class backgrounds who do not have the funds or the qualifications to emigrate officially have looked for other ways to leave the country.

Some of the new wave of Chinese migrants have looked to enter the United States through the migrant corridor that connects South and Central America with the US southern border. A small but growing number have looked to Europe via the Balkans.

Laura Harth from the international human rights organization Safeguard Defenders told RFE/RL that the Balkan route for Chinese nationals is "a tentative pathway for those seeking to make it to Europe through irregular migration paths, especially with the dangerous involvement of human trafficking networks."

How Do Chinese Migrants Reach the Balkans?

Yong and Chen are reluctant to detail their lives back in China. Other Chinese migrants have expressed fear that they or their families could be identified by Chinese authorities and face repercussions.

Both men claim to have lost their passports but said they do not want help from Chinese embassies and instead expect assistance from the International Organization for Migration (IOM).

The Chinese embassies in Belgrade and Sarajevo did not respond to RFE/RL's inquiries about Chinese citizens using the Balkan route.

While some crossings are attempted from Serbia, where Chinese citizens can remain for 30 days visa-free, it is more common for them to try and enter the EU from Bosnia, which allows for 90-day stays without a visa and has a far longer border with Croatia.

In Croatia, 454 Chinese nationals applied for international asylum in 2024 and 377 in the first nine months of 2025.

"All of them arrived from Bosnia-Herzegovina and Serbia, abusing the visa-free regime in those countries," a spokesperson from Croatia's Interior Ministry told RFE/RL.

The exact number of Chinese nationals passing along the Balkan route is unknown. Only the number of those caught crossing illegally is known. And many Chinese migrants have turned to trafficking networks that can bring them into the EU.

Bosnia-Herzegovina's Security Ministry told RFE/RL that the number of Chinese nationals detected in illegal border crossings has increased dramatically over the past two years, going from only two people in 2023 to 151 in 2024.

Few Chinese migrants elect to apply for asylum in Bosnia-Herzegovina, with official statistics showing only three Chinese applicants out of a total of 21,489 migrants who arrived in the country in 2024.

Serbia's Interior Ministry did not respond to RFE/RL's inquiry about how many Chinese nationals were recorded crossing the border illegally in 2025 but said it had received asylum requests from eight Chinese nationals in 2023, three in 2024, and five by September this year.

Nikola Kovacevic from the Center for Research and Social Development (IDEAS), a Belgrade-based NGO, said it's no longer uncommon to see Chinese people in the country, whether they're tourists, laborers, or migrants looking to move further west.

"It's just a few people, but previously there were none," Kovacevic told RFE/RL.

Serbian official statistics show 27 Chinese nationals were issued removal orders from the country in 2024, with illegal border crossings cited as the most common reason, accounting for 72.8 percent of all cases.

Rados Djurovic from the Belgrade-based Center for Protection and Assistance to Asylum Seekers told RFE/RL that his organization works with more than 2,500 people a year, but only a few of those cases involve Chinese citizens.

"That doesn't mean these people aren't present. If smuggling is successful, they don't need to contact us," he said.

A Shifting Migrant Route Through The Balkans

The Balkan route was used by a record number of migrants at the peak of Europe's refugee crisis in 2015 and has remained one of the main migratory paths into the Continent.

And while precise pathways to illegally cross borders change, the route has also solidified multiple smuggling groups bringing migrants into the EU.

"We've noticed that criminal groups are arriving along with migrants," Samir Avdibegovic from Vasa Prava, an NGO that recently signed a contract with Bosnia's Security Ministry to provide legal assistance to migrants, told RFE/RL.

One prominent case was Zhang Yong, a 42-year-old Chinese man who on October 15 was convicted of organizing the trafficking of women and forcing them into prostitution.

According to Bosnian prosecutors, Zhang had pushed Chinese women into prostitution in the cities of Mostar, Sarajevo, Doboj, and Banja Luka and had transported them himself from Serbia, where they arrived from China.

The Balkan migrant route was also mentioned in a Europol statement from January that announced the dismantling of a sophisticated Chinese criminal network that trafficked women across the region into the EU for "sexual exploitation."

During raids in Barcelona, Madrid, and Toledo in Spain, as well as in Zagreb, Croatia, 30 people were arrested, including the alleged leaders of the criminal network.

Criminality along the route has been part of the reason why the United Kingdom imposed sanctions on a collection of Balkan criminal groups in October, targeting known passport forgers and a financial network supplying small boat equipment to transport migrants.

London has also deployed British border security officers to the Balkans for the first time to dismantle networks smuggling migrants to the United Kingdom. Frontex also deployed more than 100 officers along Bosnia-Herzegovina's borders this year.

Enhanced border security measures in the Balkans have led to a drop in the total number of migrants.

Frontex told RFE/RL that 2025 has so far seen a 47 percent decline in "irregular border crossings" compared to last year. European Commissioner for Home Affairs and Migration Magnus Brunner said total illegal border crossings have fallen by 90 percent in the past three years.

Despite the overall decrease in migrants traveling along the Balkan route, the number of Chinese nationals appears to be going up.

"The decline of China's domestic economy, decreasing social mobility, and the near impossibility of seeking legal protection for common issues such as illegal land seizures, unpaid wages, and corrupt officials" are driving people abroad, Safeguard Defenders' Harth said.

Written by Reid Standish based on reporting from Ljudmila Cvetkovic in Serbia and Meliha Kesmer in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Predrag Zvijerac contributed to this report.