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Budapest: Thousands of people protest against the planned Chinese Fudan University

2021-06-06T12:32:17.162Z


A Chinese campus is to be built in Hungary's capital - according to Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's plan. Now thousands of people took to the streets. You accuse Orbán of being too close to China.


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A protester holds a poster with Viktor Orbán, in the guise of Mao Zedong: "The subject of Fudan is the final and utter suicide of Fidesz"

Photo: BERNADETT SZABO / REUTERS

Thousands of people took to the streets in Budapest against the planned construction of a Chinese campus in the Hungarian capital.

The background to this is the plans of the right-wing conservative government of Prime Minister Viktor Orbán to establish a branch of the Chinese Fudan University in Budapest.

The protesters held up banners that read “No Fudan!” And accused Orbán of being too close to the Chinese government.

There was also outrage that Fudan University was to be built on a site in Budapest that was originally intended for the construction of cheap student dormitories.

According to an agreement between Hungary and the President of Shanghai University, a currently fallow plot of land in Budapest will house the Fudan campus by 2024.

The plan is to build a 500,000 square meter university complex.

Hungary's Prime Minister Orbán, chairman of the Fidesz party, has very good relations with Beijing and has already vetoed EU decisions critical of China.

The city of Budapest, ruled by the opposition, is against the project.

"The subject of Fudan is the final and complete suicide of Fidesz," said Mayor Gergely Karacsony after information from the German press agency at the rally in front of the parliament in Budapest.

The eco-liberal town hall chief is considered a likely challenger to Orbán in the parliamentary elections in 2022.

Karacsony made it clear that the protest was directed neither against China nor against the Chinese, but against Orbán's curtailment of the freedom of science.

He cited Orbán's 2018 expulsion of the Central European University (CEU), financed by the US philanthropist George Soros, and the political appropriation of the Budapest Theater University, which began in 2020, as examples.

The major project for the first European campus of Fudan University has caused a sensation both in Hungary and in the EU.

Brussels fears Hungary's slow departure from the EU as it turns more and more to China.

ime / AFP / dpa

Source: spiegel

All news articles on 2021-06-06

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