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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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.
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.
The liberal mayor has previously blasted “Chinese influence-buying” in Hungary and urged Orban to honour a previous pledge not to force projects on the capital against its will.
A citywide “consultation” to canvass the population’s opinion on the project begins June 4, said Baranyi. Opinion polls show a majority of Budapest residents oppose the plan.
The government argues that a prestigious outpost of Fudan University, ranked 100th in the Shanghai Ranking, would permit thousands of Hungarian, Chinese and other international students to acquire high-quality diplomas.
It would also fit in with previously agreed plans to build a “Student City” dormitory project for thousands of mainly Hungarian students at the site, it says, although Karacsony said the Fudan campus will take over most of that project’s area.
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Fudan is the latest Landmark in Orban’s foreign policy of “Eastern Opening”, which analysts describe as a geopolitical balancing act.
Critics portray the nationalist premier as China and Russia’s “Trojan horse” inside the European Union and Nato.
Last month Karacsony announced he will run in a primary election organised by an alliance of six opposition parties to select a challenger to Orban at a general election in early 2022.
Polls show the opposition alliance holds a narrow lead over Orban’s ruling right-wing Fidesz party, and that Karacsony is currently the most likely to win the primary which will be held in September.
