Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government acknowledged this week that it has received a 1 billion euro ($1,086,525,000) loan from Chinese banks that Budapest must repay within three years.
The loan process was reportedly completed in April, one month before China’s genocidal communist dictator Xi Jinping visited Hungary and signed over 10 bilateral agreements with Prime Minister Orban. After Hungary assumed the Presidency of the Council of the European Union, Prime Minister Orban and President Xi Jinping met again in July as part of Prime Minister Orban’s “peace mission” calling for an end to active hostilities in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
The massive loan, believed to be the largest in Hungary’s modern history, is owed money to one of the world’s most unscrupulous lenders, sparking discomfort among observers who note how China has abused credit lines provided to poor countries such as Sri Lanka, Kenya and Venezuela. China is making much of the loan through a program known as the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure plan that provides loans to Chinese companies to build cost-prohibitive infrastructure products in poor countries. Many countries have fallen behind on payments, losing funding and control over the projects in question.
Hungary is one of Europe’s most enthusiastic BRI partners.
The April loan appears to be unrelated to the BRI but is likely intended for infrastructure investment, according to Politico. report Separate Hungarian media reports on the loan on Thursday portfolioThese are obligations owed to the China Development Bank, the Export-Import Bank of China and the Hungarian branch of the Bank of China and are subject to “floating” interest rates.
“The loan agreement will allow financing investments in infrastructure and the energy sector, among other things,” a government agency tasked with managing the loan told Politico. “The deal will keep the public debt-to-GDP ratio within the 28.9% cap.”
Politico described Orban’s economy as “in desperate need of cash” as a result of record-high public debt. ambitious Social program spending.
Orbán controls Hungary’s domestic and foreign policies. belief He argues that Communist China is “one of the pillars of our new multipolar world” and a reliable business and diplomatic partner. He has actively refrained from criticizing China’s human rights abuses, including the persecution of Chinese Christians and the ongoing genocide of the Uighurs, focusing instead on strengthening trade and academic ties with China.
Orbán made Beijing one of his first stops after assuming the EU presidency, meeting with Chinese President Xi Jinping in early July to discuss what China can do to help end Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. China was the first stop on Orbán’s “peace mission” after Ukraine and Russia.
“Hungary is ready to take the EU’s rotating presidency as an opportunity to actively promote the healthy development of EU-China relations,” Orban told Xi during his visit to Beijing, according to China’s state-run Xinhua News Agency, which summarized his remarks. “Hungary highly values and attaches importance to China’s role and influence, and is ready to maintain close strategic communication and coordination with China,” he added.
“China is the only world power that has been clearly committed to peace from the beginning,” Orban told reporters at the time. China is one of Russia’s closest geopolitical partners and has not condemned Russia’s full-scale invasion of BRI member Ukraine, which began in February 2022.
Orbán’s July visit was preceded by President Xi’s visit to Budapest in May for talks directly related to bilateral relations. Xi also visited three European countries that month, making friendly visits to Serbia and France.
Xi and Orbán signed 18 agreements on joint projects, including “green cooperation,” “supply chain cooperation,” and other economic issues. During his visit to Budapest, Orbán thanked Xi for China’s provision of COVID-19 vaccine products to Hungary, which Gao Fu, former director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), said “has little preventive effect.” Orbán praised China, the country where the Wuhan coronavirus originated, for saving “many Hungarian lives” with its vaccine products.
The cooperation agreement signed in May expands the significant economic cooperation that already exists between the two countries. One of the biggest announced is Chinese electric vehicle (EV) manufacturer BYD’s plans to enter Hungary. BYD announced plans to build a factory in Szeged in southern Hungary in December, which Foreign Minister Peter Szijjártó described as “one of the largest investments in the history of the Hungarian economy.” BYD has been aggressively expanding into countries such as Turkey, Mexico and Brazil, driven by China’s global monopoly on processing rare earth minerals, which are needed as fuel for EV batteries and many other electronic devices.
