China has offered to deepen security cooperation with Hungary, underscoring Budapest’s warming ties with Beijing just as Hungarian officials snubbed a visiting delegation from Washington. Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orbán, met China’s minister of public security, Wang Xiaohong, on Friday. In comments published by China’s official Xinhua news agency over the weekend, Wang said he was hoping to “deepen cooperation in areas including counter-terrorism, combating transnational crimes, security and law enforcement capacity building under the belt and road initiative”. The aim, according to the Chinese minister, would be “to make…
Tag: Hungary
BYD, a Chinese Electric Car Giant, to Build a Plant in Hungary
BYD, China’s electric-vehicle juggernaut, said Friday it would build an assembly plant in Hungary, its first production facility for battery-powered cars in Europe and the latest sign of the company’s ambitious plans to expand beyond Asia. BYD is already the world’s largest maker of electric vehicles, most of them sold in China, and has begun to open dealerships in Europe as it aims to expand sales globally. Last year it sold 1.86 million battery-powered cars, including plug-in hybrids, which have both an electric motor and gas-powered engine. That topped Tesla,…
European leaders seethe over Putin-Orbán meeting
European leaders must not “fall” for the tactics of Vladimir Putin, the Czech president, Petr Pavel, has said, two days after Hungary’s prime minister shook hands with Russia’s leader. Viktor Orbán, in a rare move for the leader of a country that belongs to the EU and Nato, met Putin in Beijing on Tuesday for what the Hungarian leader’s office described as a discussion on energy cooperation and peace. Hungary has long been criticised for democratic backsliding at home and its Russia- and China-friendly policies abroad. Its foreign minister, Péter…
Athens Democracy Forum: Daring to Hope That Democracy Will Prevail
That Mr. Putin had to journey to North Korea last month to seek support for a long war was a measure of his humiliating isolation, whatever Russia’s ascendancy in Africa, where it has contrived to present itself as an anticolonial power even as it fights a form of colonial war aimed at reabsorbing Ukraine, or much of it, into the “Russkiy Mir,” or Russian world. Ukraine, of course, is fighting for democracy, freedom, the sanctity of sovereignty and the right of a sovereign state to choose its strategic direction. This…
A Hungarian Town Seethes Over a Giant Chinese Battery Plant
The small-town mayor, long a loyal foot soldier for Hungary’s governing party, recently committed what he described as “political suicide,” throwing himself in the path of an enormous $7.8 billion Chinese battery factory project promoted by his dissent-intolerant prime minister, Viktor Orban. “It is like lying in front of a steamroller,” Zoltan Timar, the mayor of Mikepercs, said of his decision to side with residents opposed to the project, which his Fidesz party championed. “I just hope it won’t roll over me too soon.” The factory, which would be the…
Can China Reverse Its Population Decline? Just Ask Sweden.
China’s population has begun to decline, a demographic turning point for the country that has global implications. Experts had long anticipated this moment, but it arrived in 2022 several years earlier than expected, prompting hand-wringing among economists over the long-term impacts given the country’s immense economic heft and its role as the world’s manufacturer. With 850,000 fewer births than deaths last year, at least according to the country’s official report, China joined an expanding set of nations with shrinking populations caused by years of falling fertility and often little or…
Hospitals under fire and hard-won abortion rights: human rights this fortnight – in pictures
Rama, a 16-year-old Syrian refugee, holds a smiley face as she sits in the office of an organisation that cares for girls who have been forced into early marriage in Saadnayel, Lebanon. Rama was married at 14, divorced a year later and is a mother to an 18-month-old baby. Photograph: Marwan Naamani/DPA The Guardian
What Game Theory Says about China’s Strategy
On March 19, 1956, The New York Times carried an interview with Matyas Rakosi, who was described as “Hungary’s ebullient Communist boss.” Rakosi said that his enemies had accused him of using “salami tactics,” that is, cutting away all opposition slice by slice. He didn’t deny it: “That is the job of any good political party — including the Communists,” Rakosi said. Salami-slicing may have originated as a metaphor in Hungary, but in the decades since, it has entered the vocabulary of politicians, military tacticians and editorial writers far from…