"Hungary’s willingness to enter security arrangements with Xi Jinping and do the bidding of Vladimir Putin while, simultaneously, maintain membership in NATO and the EU is deeply troubling and presents an existential crisis for those alliances," writes Elaine Dezenski, senior director and head of the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies in the U.S.
The €3.8 billion Serbia-Hungary railway project, financed by Chinese loans under the BRI, is expected to be completed by 2025, but some estimates suggest that it will take a further 979 years — or nearly a millennium — for Hungary to break even on the project.
Hungary’s BRI issues are not unique. As described in a new report on the BRI, "Tightening the Belt or End of the Road", many BRI projects around the world face serious challenges, from hydroelectric dams with thousands of cracks in Ecuador, to promised infrastructure that was never built in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to massive debt distress in Zambia.
"Despite the problems for host countries and the large portfolio of failing loans for China, Beijing has still been successful at building influence across authoritarian-leaning regimes, who are eager to follow the Chinese model of single-party state control and high-tech domestic repression," Dezenski says..
While Western states have awoken to the risk of overreliance on Chinese supply lines, Hungarian officials are taking the opposite approach, going so far as to call de-risking suicidal.
This position, however, doesn’t impact Hungary alone. The entire EU market is open to Chinese manipulations through the Hungarian economy, such as dumping of cheap goods to prop up the failing Chinese economy or undermining domestic European industries with subsidised competitors.
As German chemical giant BASF seeks to disengage from China’s Xinjiang region, leaked documents indicate that China is planning to build a chemical hub in Hungary.
Just to push back, a littie, on an easily caricatured picture.
China is looking far less strong economically than it was just a few years ago. In the coming years the Chinese economy will face challenges at least as big as any facing the West. The notion that China will buy up and thus vassalize Europe is not, on balance, very rational. In the 1980s the USA was seriously concerned that Japan would eat up the world. Japan.
The Economist looked into the BRI recently and came to the conclusion that the scheme was essentially economic rather than political - a way to get rid of excess capital in the 2010s, with some potential political benefits on the side. Not the other way round.
None of this justifies Chinese abuses or Hungary's anti-EU antics.