Budapest renames streets in Chinese university protest

AFP 04 June 2021

Budapest’s mayor said on Wednesday 2 June that the city has renamed streets around the planned site of a top Chinese university to protest an “unwanted” project forced on it by Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government, reports AFP.

Four street signs at the site now bear the names “Free Hong Kong road”, “Uyghur Martyrs’ road”, “Dalai Lama road”, and “Bishop Xie Shiguang road” referring to a persecuted Chinese Catholic priest. “We still hope the project won’t happen but if it does then it will have to put up with these names,” Mayor Gergely Karácsony told a joint press conference with the district mayor Krisztina Baranyi.

Currently derelict, the area is to house Fudan University’s first European campus in a half-million-square-metre (five-million-square-foot) complex by 2024, according to a deal signed between Hungary and the Shanghai-based university’s president. But the sprawling project has fed growing unease about Hungary’s diplomatic tilt from West to East and its soaring indebtedness to China.
Full report on the RFI site

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