China-CEEC (the Central and Eastern European countries) forestry cooperation, also known as 17+1 forestry cooperation, is an important part of China-CEEC cooperation. To clarify the focus of forestry research between the two parties and make the 17+1 forestry cooperation more targeted, this study explored the common direction and field of forest ecosystem research between China and the 17 countries in the Central and Eastern Europe by comparing their forest ecosystem research status. The purpose of the research is to provide support for China-CEEC forestry cooperation. In this paper, citation spatial analysis tool (Citespace and VOSviewer) were used to compare and analyze the papers that had been published in China and 17 countries in Central and Eastern European and included in the Web of Science Core Collection during 2016—2020. The dataset covers countries, research institutions, authors, keyword co-occurrence analysis and burst keyword analysis. The results show that: ①the number of published papers on forest ecosystem research among 17 countries in the Central and Eastern Europe are obviously different. Among them, Poland and the Czech Republic published the most papers in the field of forest ecosystem research, accounting for 26.91% and 26.91% of the total number of papers published by the CEEC. The articles of the two countries are cited 8.46 times/article and 9.85 times/ article, respectively. ② The number of forest ecosystem research papers published by China is 12951, which is higher than the total number of 8952 papers in the CEEC, and the citation of each article is 8.58 times, which is lower than the average of 9.90 times/article in the CEEC. ③Climate change, biodiversity, and forest soil are the common research priorities of China and Central and Eastern European countries. ④China’s research priorities also include improving the quality of plantation forests. The research priorities of the CEEC also include heavy metals, which are mainly manifested in heavy metal pollution, assessment, and soil and vegetation restoration. Based on the analysis of papers published in the forest ecosystem research field of China and the CEEC, the research provides the following suggestions for forestry cooperation between China and The CEEC: For China, the partners in climate change include the Polish Academy of Sciences, the University of Warsaw, and Czech University of Life Sciences; the partners in biodiversity include the Czech University of Life Sciences, the Czech Academy of Sciences, and the Polish Academy of Sciences; the partners in soil microbiology are the University of Tartu, the Polish Academy of Sciences; The partners in soil heavy metals are Krakow Agricultural University, the Polish Academy of Sciences, and the University of Gdansk in Poland; the partners in the pest control is the Czech University of Life Sciences.