Thousands of Hungarians on Saturday demonstrated in Budapest against a plan by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government to build a campus of a top Chinese university in the city.
About 10,000 people, according to an Agence France-Presse photographer, marched through the Hungarian capital to protest the proposed Fudan University campus, which is planned to be completed by 2024.
According to a deal signed between Hungary and the Shanghai-based university’s president, the campus, its first in Europe, would be a 500,000m2 complex.
Photo: Reuters
However, the sprawling project has fed unease about Hungary’s diplomatic tilt from West to East and its soaring indebtedness to China, as well as sparked a diplomatic spat between Beijing and Budapest’s liberal mayor.
Leaked internal documents revealed that China is expected to give a 1.3 billion euro (US$1.58 billion) loan to cover most of the estimated 1.5 billion euro costs.
“No Fudan! West, not East!” read one placard at the protest, while another accused Orban and his ruling right-wing party Fidesz of cozying up to China.
“Orban and Fidesz portray themselves as anti-communists, but in reality the communists are their friends,” Szonja Radics, a 21-year-old university student, told reporters at the protest, the first major demonstration in Hungary this year.
With an opinion poll last week showing that a majority of Budapest residents oppose the plan, Budapest Mayor Gergely Karacsony has urged Orban not to force unwanted projects on the city.
On Wednesday, he announced the renaming of streets around the proposed campus site to “Free Hong Kong Road,” “Dalai Lama Road” and “Uighur Martyrs’ Road” to highlight Chinese human rights sore points.
A Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs spokesperson on Thursday said that the move was “beneath contempt,” but added that it should not affect the project.
Orban’s government has said that a prestigious outpost of Fudan University would permit thousands of Hungarian and international students to acquire high-quality qualifications.
It would also fit in with an older plan to build a “Student City” dormitory project for thousands of Hungarian students at the site, it said, although Karacsony, who is eyeing a run against Orban at a general election next year, fears the Fudan campus would take over most of the area.
Saturday’s protest “made no sense, as the process is still at the planning stage,” Tamas Schanda, a government official, said, adding that the final decision would be made “in the second half of 2022.”
Fudan is the latest landmark in Orban’s foreign policy of “Eastern Opening,” which analysts describe as a geopolitical balancing act.
Critics have portrayed the nationalist prime minister as China and Russia’s “Trojan horse” inside the EU and NATO.
The courting of Fudan, which deleted references to “freedom of thought” from its charter in 2019, also fuels concerns about academic freedom in Hungary.
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