China’s state-run Global Times propaganda newspaper praised the government of Hungary under self-proclaimed conservative Prime Minister Viktor Orbán on Monday for greenlighting the construction of a Chinese electric vehicle battery factory and being “rational and pragmatic” in maintaining friendly relations with the Chinese Communist Party.
Under Orbán, who strives to maintain close ties to the American right-wing community, Hungary has greatly expanded the Chinese Communist Party’s economic and cultural presence in the country. Orbán made Hungary the first European leader to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a global infrastructure debt trap scheme in which China offers participating countries predatory loans later used to erode their sovereignty. Hungary has allowed China to operate its “Confucius Institutes,” academic institutions used to spread communism, on its soil, and more recently emphasized that it supported the “One China principle” – the false idea that the nation of Taiwan is a province of communist China.
China’s government-owned Xinhua News Agency reported last week that Hungarian Foreign Affairs and Trade Minister Péter Szijjártó confirmed the plan to build the electric vehicle battery plant.
Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), a Chinese company, will reportedly invest $7.6 billion in “building a plant to manufacture batteries for carmakers in Hungary,” Xinhua reported. CATL is the world’s largest electric vehicle battery supplier and a primary supplier to manufacturers such as Tesla, BMW, and Honda. It is not officially a state-owned company but, under communism, private property does not exist in practice, and CATL came to dominate the electric vehicle battery industry thanks to the extensive support and involvement of the Chinese Communist Party. In addition to heavy subsidies from Beijing, CATL has also faced accusations of human rights abuses common among Chinese regime-tied companies, such as potentially using Uyghur slaves in its supply chain and potentially purchasing cobalt and other key metals mined by child slaves in Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
SHANGHAI, CHINA – NOVEMBER 06: Li Ping, Vice Chairman of the Contemporary Amperex Technology Co., Limited (CATL), speaks during China Europe CEO Summit as part of the 3rd China International Import Expo (CIIE) at the National Exhibition and Convention Center on November 6, 2020 in Shanghai, China. (Photo by Han Haidan/China News Serivce)
“We are proud that CATL decided to execute the biggest ever greenfield investment in the history of Hungary,” Szijjártó declared last week in a statement on Facebook. CATL’s Hungarian operation will be its second in Europe, after building a plant in Germany.
Lauding Hungary’s decision to allow CATL to make the tremendous investment within its borders, the Global Times praised Hungarian leaders on Monday for the “perfectly normal business decision.” It emphasized that Hungary offered an especially favorable investment environment on the world stage.
“Hungary offers Chinese companies predictability in terms of policy and business environment,” the Global Times observed. “Hungary, the first country in Europe to sign Memorandum of Understanding [sic] with China on jointly building the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative, has offered Chinese companies a lot of preferential policies for their investments.”
“Budapest insists on being rational and pragmatic, not blindly following and avoiding its own national interests to be hijacked by others’ political motivation and bear unnecessary price for it,” the state propaganda outlet applauded. “The stability and predictability of its investment environment has paid. Hungary’s ambassador to China said that Hungary is proud to be the ‘main entry point’ of large Chinese enterprises into Europe.”
CATL’s investment in China stands in stark contrast to rhetoric against communism and “globalism” from Orbán, who styles himself as a defender of family values.
“The globalists can all go to hell,” Orbán proclaimed during last week’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Texas, during the same month that the globalist Chinese regime announced the biggest foreign investment in the history of Hungary.
DALLAS, TEXAS – AUGUST 04: Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán speaks at the Conservative Political Action Conference CPAC held at the Hilton Anatole on August 04, 2022 in Dallas, Texas. CPAC began in 1974, and is a conference that brings together and hosts conservative organizations, activists, and world leaders in discussing current events and future political agendas. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images)
“We must take back the institutions in Washington and in Brussels. We must find friends and allies in one another. We must coordinate the movement of our troops because we face the same challenge,” Orbán urged, claiming that his country was “under the siege of progressive liberals,” apparently not referring to the Chinese Communist Party.
Orbán in the past had vowed to “bring the uncompromising anti-communist tradition into the common store of European values” and fight against “international socialism,” and his administration has touted its condemnation of Christian persecution around the world, but markedly omitted China–which arguably represses the largest Christian population of any country–from that denunciation.
Orbán’s Hungary has also used its diplomatic arms to defend communist China’s interests. Last week, for example, the Hungarian Foreign Affairs Ministry issued a statement in response to China’s ongoing military harassment of sovereign Taiwan, taking Beijing’s side.
“We sincerely hope that the situation around Taiwan will not escalate and that the world’s major powers will return to cooperation based on mutual respect and trust as soon as possible,” a statement by Foreign Affairs Ministry state secretary Tamás Menczer said. “Hungarian foreign policy will remain consistent with the ‘one China’ principle.”
The “‘one China’ principle” is the claim that Taiwan is a province of China. It is distinct from America’s “one China policy,” which states that there is only one China in the world, but does not specify that Taiwan is a part of that China.
China has, in turn, offered Orbán’s government a commitment to “staunchly support” it. In a call to Szijjártó in April, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi reportedly celebrated Orbán’s landslide election win that month and said “China will continue to staunchly support Hungary in preserving its independent choice of development path.”