As European attitudes towards China grow more skeptical, Hungarian leader Viktor Orbán has never wavered in his support for deeper links.
Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Peter Szijjarto, welcomes Wang Yi for a meeting in Budapest, Hungary, February 20, 2023. Credit: Zoltan Mathe/MTI via AP Photos
China’s ties with central and eastern Europe have frayed in recent years, with one notable exception — Hungary. Late last month, its foreign minister Péter Szijjártó said he was visiting China with an ambitious objective in mind: to make his country the number one investment destination for Chinese companies in the region. As EU leaders continue to debate the extent of their decoupling or derisking from China, Szijjártó had a blunt message: cutting ties would be “economic suicide” for Europe.
Hungary’s unwavering push for deeper links with China makes it an outlier in a region that has seen how political differences can rupture economic relations overnight. A row between Lithuania and China in 2021 over Taiwan forced the Baltic state’s European neighbors into making tricky calculations about how far they should show solidarity.
This week, The Wire looks at recent investments from Chinese companies into Hungary, and considers why the country proves attractive for
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Robert Lighthizer, the U.S. Trade Representative under Donald Trump, reflects on his decision to launch the trade war with China and begin the process of "strategic decoupling" — a process he says the U.S. must see through to the end.
