China and Hungary in a disrupted world: China policy in Hungary in 2022
Csaba Moldicz
Abstract
The year of 2022 will be one of historical years to remember for many decades, this year will go down in history as a juncture when initially small differences in policy responses to global pandemic and the war in Ukraine led to different foreign policies and ultimately, they also created divergent paths in history.
Hungary’s China policy seems to be one of the most consequent ones in the region, while other Central European countries appear to have changed the course of their China-policy and attempt to get in line with the U.S. foreign policy goals. The best examples of this altered course of foreign policy are Estonia and Latvia, who left the 16+1 cooperation in August 2022 or Lithuania who quit the formation a year before. This paper attempts to characterize Hungarian foreign policy regarding China in two ways: (1) it explains the economic development factors and aspects that strengthen economic cooperation with China (2) and it also contrasts Hungarian foreign policy with Baltic countries’ China policy.
The basic research question of the paper is why Hungary can keep the China-friendly course of the foreign policy. By doing so, the paper relies on secondary data and exiting literature. There is special case of investment which is investigated in the paper in details. There are several reasons for that: the investment is the largest ever in the Hungarian economy, the sector of the investment is of special relevance to the long-term development of the Hungarian economy.