Xi Jinping upgrades China’s ties with Hungary to ‘all-weather’ partnership

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China’s President Xi Jinping has hailed Hungary as one of Beijing’s most important strategic partners, showering accolades on maverick Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s country during a trip to Europe that analysts have said is intended to widen divisions in the EU and Nato.

China and Hungary had upgraded their relationship to an “all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership for the new era”, Xi told carefully selected journalists in Orbán’s office atop the Buda Castle Hill in Budapest.

“Our bilateral relationship is at the best it has ever been in our history,” Xi said. “We will do our utmost to guide our relationship and co-operation on to a golden path, which helps us attain loftier goals.”

The change from Hungary and China’s previous “comprehensive strategic partnership” puts Budapest in a rarefied place in Beijing’s diplomatic pantheon.

Analysts said that only China’s ties with Russia, which are officially called “comprehensive strategic partnership of co-ordination for a new era” outranked Hungary’s new designation, though Beijing also has a close relationship with North Korea, with which it has a military treaty.

The use of “new era” — a phrase synonymous with Xi’s personal vision — was particularly striking, the analysts said.

Yu Jie, a China expert at Chatham House, a UK think-tank, said the new phrasing was a significant elevation of the status China accorded Hungary.

“It shows that China wants to make Hungary the leading country that it engages with in the European Union. It also wants Hungary to act as a bridge to further Chinese relations with the EU,” she said.

China’s president said the two countries’ “governments, parliaments and parties” would tighten ties while “offering steadfast support for each other’s core interests”.

“We will deepen economic, trade and financial co-operation,” Xi said. “We will promote the Belgrade-Budapest railway and other key [infrastructure] projects. We will expand co-operation in emerging economic sectors with a new quality of engagement.”

Ahead of his arrival in Hungary, the final stop of a five-day, three-nation European tour, Xi had praised Orbán’s government for pursuing an “independent” foreign policy and “defying” great power politics.

In Serbia on Wednesday, Xi signed a joint statement with President Aleksandar Vučić on the creation of a “China-Serbia community with a shared future”, an endorsement of the Chinese leader’s effort to build a coalition of countries that oppose what he sees as US hegemony.

In Budapest, Xi said he counted on Hungary to become an ever-stronger member of the EU and that China wanted to focus on building regional ties in central and eastern Europe alongside Hungary.

Orbán, who has a combative relationship with Hungary’s partners within Nato and the EU, was equally effusive. In the 20 years since a Chinese president had last visited Budapest, the world had become multipolar, he said adding: “one important pillar of that is China, which sets the direction of the world economy”.

“We always regarded China as a friend,” he said.

Orbán said Hungary supported China’s peace plan for the war in Ukraine, reiterating his call for an immediate ceasefire and peace talks — a policy that Nato allies reject as akin to capitulation.

“There are areas where China is the best in the world, including some where it laps the world,” Orbán said, adding that electric vehicles, railways and information technology were areas where Hungary was keen to co-operate.

He said co-operation between Beijing and Budapest would include the “full spectrum of nuclear [power] industry, where we have not co-operated until now”.

Officials of the two countries on Thursday signed 18 economic agreements, Hungary’s foreign minister Péter Szijjártó said.

China and Hungary would co-operate on a cargo railroad around Budapest, a new high-speed rail link between the capital’s airport and city centre and construction of an oil pipeline between Hungary and Serbia, Szijjártó said.

Serbia currently relies on a single oil pipeline traversing Croatia for its crude imports.