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.
Nvidia Corp yesterday unveiled its new high-speed interconnect technology, NVLink Fusion, with Taiwanese application-specific IC (ASIC) designers Alchip Technologies Ltd (世芯) and MediaTek Inc (聯發科) among the first to adopt the technology to help build semi-custom artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure for hyperscalers. Nvidia has opened its technology to outside users, as hyperscalers and cloud service providers are building their own cost-effective AI chips, or accelerators, used in AI servers by leveraging ASIC firms’ designing capabilities to reduce their dependence on Nvidia. Previously, NVLink technology was only available for Nvidia’s own AI platform. “NVLink Fusion opens Nvidia’s AI platform and rich ecosystem for
WARNING: From Jan. 1 last year to the end of last month, 89 Taiwanese have gone missing or been detained in China, the MAC said, urging people to carefully consider travel to China Lax enforcement had made virtually moot regulations banning civil servants from making unauthorized visits to China, the Control Yuan said yesterday. Several agencies allowed personnel to travel to China after they submitted explanations for the trip written using artificial intelligence or provided no reason at all, the Control Yuan said in a statement, following an investigation headed by Control Yuan member Lin Wen-cheng (林文程). The probe identified 318 civil servants who traveled to China without permission in the past 10 years, but the true number could be close to 1,000, the Control Yuan said. The public employees investigated were not engaged in national
ALL TOGETHER: Only by including Taiwan can the WHA fully exemplify its commitment to ‘One World for Health,’ the representative offices of eight nations in Taiwan said The representative offices in Taiwan of eight nations yesterday issued a joint statement reiterating their support for Taiwan’s meaningful engagement with the WHO and for Taipei’s participation as an observer at the World Health Assembly (WHA). The joint statement came as Taiwan has not received an invitation to this year’s WHA, which started yesterday and runs until Tuesday next week. This year’s meeting of the decisionmaking body of the WHO in Geneva, Switzerland, would be the ninth consecutive year Taiwan has been excluded. The eight offices, which reaffirmed their support for Taiwan, are the British Office Taipei, the Australian Office Taipei, the
DANGEROUS DRIVERS: The proposal follows a fatal incident on Monday involving a 78-year-old driver, which killed three people and injured 12 The Ministry of Transportation and Communications yesterday said it would lower the age for elderly drivers to renew their license from 75 to 70 as part of efforts to address safety issues caused by senior motorists. The new policy was proposed in light of a deadly incident on Monday in New Taipei City’s Sansia District (三峽), in which a 78-year-old motorist surnamed Yu (余) sped through a school zone, killing three people and injuring 12. Last night, another driver sped down a street in Tainan’s Yuching District (玉井), killing one pedestrian and injuring two. The incidents have sparked public discussion over whether seniors