Budapest renames streets after Hong Kong, Dalai Lama to protest nearby site for China’s Fudan University

The Fudan University project has fuelled unease about Hungary’s diplomatic tilt from West to East and its soaring indebtedness to China

‘We still hope the project won’t happen but if it does then it will have to put up with these names,’ mayor Gergely Karacsony said

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Activists hold the Tibetan flag underneath a street sign reading “Dalai Lama Road” in Budapest, Hungary. Photo: AFP

Published: 10:55pm, 2 Jun 2021Updated: 11:51pm, 2 Jun 2021

Budapest has renamed streets around the planned site of a top Chinese university to protest an “unwanted” project forced on it by Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government, the city’s mayor said Wednesday.

Four street signs at the site now bear the names “Free Hong Kong Road”, “Uygur Martyrs’ Road”, “Dalai Lama Road” and “Bishop Xie Shiguang Road” referring to a persecuted Chinese Catholic priest.

“We still hope the project won’t happen but if it does then it will have to put up with these names,” Gergely Karacsony told a joint press conference with the district mayor Krisztina Baranyi.

Currently derelict, the area is to house Fudan University’s first European campus in a 500,000-square-metre (124-acre) complex by 2024, according to a deal signed between Hungary and the Shanghai-based university’s president.

But the sprawling project has fed growing unease about Hungary’s diplomatic tilt from West to East and its soaring indebtedness to China.

Leaked internal documents revealed that China is expected to give a €1.3 billion (US$1.6 billion) loan to cover most of the estimated €1.5 billion costs.

“We don’t want the elite and private Fudan University here at the expense of Hungarian taxpayers,” said Karacsony.