An Assessment of the Hungarian Partnership in the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative

In June 2015, China and Hungary concluded an agreement for Hungary to become a partner in China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), also referred to as “One Belt, One Road”. The BRI was launched by the Chinese President Xi Jinping in 2013 presenting Beijing’s ambitious strategy of connecting China to Eurasia and beyond through a network over land and maritime routes and rail lines. The BRI partnership ties in with Hungary adding a new foreign policy dimension to its integration into Western politico-economic structures. Hungary’s new foreign policy orientation, referred to as “Eastern Opening”, is accommodating to upcoming geopolitical and financial-economic powers in Asia. In this chapter, Chinese and Hungarian financial-economic relations are studied within the theory of critical geopolitics. A three-layered toolkit provides a framework for in-depth analysis of developing financial-economic relations. It is demonstrated that bilateral financial-economic cooperation and mutual domestic investments are modest, although China has benefited most from expanding trade relations and investments in Hungary. The biggest advancement in Chinese-Hungarian cooperation has been made on the regional/global level. Between China and the Central and Eastern European Countries (CEECs), a so-called “17+1 cooperation” has been established which assigns Hungary a strategic position to facilitate infrastructural and transport connectivity within the BRI. The plan to construct the Budapest-Belgrade high-speed rail line connecting Central Europe and the Balkans has been heavily criticized by the EU, however. The chapter concludes that such hard connections lay a solid foundation for long-term cooperation between China and Hungary in the framework of the BRI.