Seeking to advertise the economic value of political fealty to Beijing, the Chinese Communist Party rewarded Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on Monday.
In an editorial, Beijing’s state media Global Times newspaper congratulated Hungary over a major new construction project. It proclaimed that “China’s biggest electric vehicle battery maker,” Contemporary Amperex Technology, is to build a $7.5 billion battery plant in Hungary. In return for his political support for China in European Union and NATO policy meetings, and his silence over Chinese human rights and militarism, Orban has earned China’s economic patronage.
Controlled by the Chinese Communist Party foreign policy chief Yang Jiechi, the Global Times is not terribly subtle about the quid pro quo nature of this foreign investment. It explains that Contemporary Amperex has suspended new investments in the U.S. because of Washington’s “poisonous atmosphere of pan-politicization and generalization of [the] concept of security.” The newspaper laments “the ‘Atlanticists’ who interfere with Europe’s pragmatic and rational cooperation, as well as U.S. and Western politicians obsessed with ‘values based diplomacy.'”
This fury reflects China’s deep concern over U.S. efforts to mobilize allies against China’s unfair trade practices and use/theft of Western technology to undermine Western security.
Beijing is particularly alarmed by the EU parliament’s moves to restrict exports from China’s Xinjiang province in response to Xi Jinping’s genocide against the Uyghur people and increasing market-supply access restrictions faced by technology providers such as 5G giant Huawei. These moves undermine China’s strategy, supported by top European leaders such as recently departed German Chancellor Angela Merkel, to win the EU’s appeasement of China on foreign policy concerns in return for economic investment.
In turn, the friendship of governments such as that of Hungary have taken on dramatically increased importance for Beijing. China particularly values Orban’s obstruction of EU and NATO measures to constrain Chinese economic and security priorities.
Put simply, Beijing wants other nations to know that Orban’s example pays, quite literally.
The Global Times praises how “Budapest insists on being rational and pragmatic, not blindly following and avoiding its own national interests to be hijacked.” It adds that investments to reward pro-Beijing governments offer “a phenomenon with wider and inspiring significance.”
At least when it comes to Orban, however, there’s a truly impressive hypocrisy in play here. Consider, after all, how Orban used his recent CPAC-Dallas speech to warn American conservatives that a new generation of communists threaten their interests. Conservatives, he said, would “have to defeat them again.” This rhetoric rings a little hollow coming as it does from the very same leader who has welcomed a $1.5 billion campus of Fudan University, an ideological citadel of the Chinese Communist Party, to his own capital city! The truth is that Orban is communist China’s closest friend in the West (at least since Merkel left office).
Of course, as a democratically elected leader with a very powerful and recently retained parliamentary mandate, Orban has the right to pursue whatever foreign policy he wishes. The issue is that the U.S. has the same right. And in that regard, it is no longer credible for Orban to receive the benefits of his American alliance while he flirts with America’s preeminent adversary. Moreover, this isn’t just about China. Orban is also a very thinly veiled puppet for Vladimir Putin’s aggressive interests toward the West.
The Global Times concluded its homage by calling on Hungary to provide “more ‘entry points’ for Chinese enterprises to enter Europe, and connecting the dots.”
It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots as to where Orban stands. It isn’t on America’s side. If CPAC wants to invite Orban back for next year’s summit, that is their prerogative. But we should question why such a close friend of communist China finds such a warm welcome by American conservatives.
