Budapest’s Chinese University
*Caroline Knowles
Back on the rails, listening to stories and walking the ragged end of Budapest’s nineth district. To reach a nearby built-up area rather than retrace my steps through a wasteland with the occasional industrial complex I had spent the morning exploring on foot, I must cross six railway tracks with no formal crossing point. I watch a woman navigate the rails from the other side of the tracks and ask her advice about gaps in the fence there between road and rail before stepping out. With some trepidation. It is just three months since I fell down a railway embankment outside of Sofia in Bulgaria breaking my ankle and putting my Belt-Road tour from Beijing to Europe on hold as I limped back to London on crutches.
In contrast to earlier sections of the Belt-Road’s Middle Passage, many rail tracks connect Sofia, the first stop in Europe with the rest of the continent. I settle on the route through Bucharest in Romania, skirting around Belgrade in Serbia where, as in Bucharest, stories of Chinese investments suggest built, financial and social landscapes reformatted. Leaving the ground for a moment and taking a more abstract view from above, these stories boil down to minimising regulations, short-circuiting tendering processes, riding rough shod over environmental regulations, confiscating land and poor compensation: all in the rush to begin construction. Beneath these stories are cash-strapped local economies, anxious politicians and local elites eager for Chinese finance and the profits they bring while local citizens pay off the loans through their taxes and watch the disappearance of public land. Budapest fits this description too. China’s direct investment in Hungary (2023) is more than US$8 billion, by far Europe’s biggest share.
Back on the ground, the wasteland I spent the morning exploring on the ragged edge of Budapest’s nineth district is the site of China’s first university in Europe; Fudan Hungary University announced to great fanfare by both governments in 2021. I walk towards it across three and four line highways, elevated routeways made for traffic not walking and dotted with corporate offices. The BYD offices sit here along with a string of high-end car dealerships and the ‘Dream Store’ that sells bathroom fittings. BYD — which stands for Build Your Dreams — is the Chinese electric car and world-leading battery manufacturer hedging its bets on sanctions against China by setting up factories inside the EU. So far it’s Hungarian operations only makes batteries, but car factories are planned and reported to be in construction in other parts of the country.
I walk past construction sites confirming the feeling that this is one of the city’s edges, a place where Budapest is still being built. One of these has blue shipping containers stacked and creatively repurposed as housing and bathrooms for construction workers. I wander around marvelling at the use of surplus Chinese containers — trade between the two countries is asymmetrical — until a man in a high vis jacket throws me out. Next I pass the stylish white tubular athletics stadium on the edge of the area where the university is supposed to be. I can see no university, no ground being prepared, no suggestion of construction, only a large tract of scrub land in autumnal browns and yellows and an impressive derelict building that is gently falling down in the distance.
Walking further I find the exact place where the university might be but isn’t. I only know this from the street names — Dali Lama, Uyghur Martyrs, Free Hong Kong and Bishop Xi Shinguang of China’s underground Catholic Church. Krisztiana Baranyi, mayor of the nineth district, renamed the streets on which the new university would sit so as to annoy the Chinese Government and discourage the university’s construction. Popular protests erupted in 2021. Building didn’t start then and the scheme didn’t deliver a completed campus by 2024 as reports claimed it would. Optimistic news reports and announcements from both the Chinese and the Hungarian side insist that there would be five to six thousand students enrolled in shiny new buildings and five hundred staff at this outpost of China’s top tier university system by 2024. Instead there is no university; only a piece of wasteland waiting for something to happen.
Local citizens protesting the scheme object to the appropriation of city land for the education of elite students. The Budapest branch of Shanghai’s top tier university intended to charge the sort of fees most Hungarian students couldn’t afford, making it a resource only for the wealthiest. City plans earlier earmarked this area as a ‘student city’ intending it to be used to build low cost rental accommodation for students and young academics. The estimated costs of building Fudan in Budapest is in the region of E1.5 billion — more than Hungary’s Higher Education operating budget for 2019 — to be financed by a loan from China repaid by Hungarian tax payers. A Chinese contractor mired in scandal — China State Construction Engineering Corporation — would build the university using Chinese labour and materials making it hard to see the benefit for local people. Perhaps most controversially of all, delivery of this project is the responsibility of a Board of Trustees, headed by the Minister of Culture. Although there is no university and no project to manage, the Board of Trustees is paid E1.5 million a year — to date E16 million — for maintenance and operating costs on non-existent buildings despite not even having an office nor producing any activity reports (Daily News Hungary 13 August 2023).
A source close to the mayor told me that the university project hasn’t gone away, but as the Hungarian Government runs out of money it has stopped or slowed a number of expensive Chinese investment projects including the Fudan campus. Another story was offered by a taxi driver taking me to Budapest Keleti station for my train to Germany and the last stop on my Belt-Road tour. He understood that the mayor had secured permission for the athletics stadium to be built in the nineth district if the university proposal was dropped. He says that while the university project isn’t a secret, ‘no one talks about it’, although Fudan University and other Chinese projects indicate radically different directions in Budapest’s future.
Bigger stories run along these rails through Hungary too. Orbán’s Fidesz Party is desperate to attract Chinese finance, even now signing deals for factories, security systems to ‘combat terrorism’ and new railway connections to Belgrade and Budapest airport. Media reports show that Orbán’s closest local allies if not Orbán himself benefit from Chinese contracts. But the biggest story of all is geopolitical. Among many rosy statements about Chinese-Hungarian cooperation and solidarity, Xi Jinping loudly proclaims that Hungary is in China’s inner ‘circle of friends’. By this he means those countries that do the most to support China’s efforts to counter US power and influence in the world. Hungary’s rail tracks are the front line in tilting the axis of global power in China’s direction: offer a new vision for how the world might work (Financial Times 11 May 2024). This makes the rails that run through Budapest and its non-existent university a very big deal indeed.
* Caroline Knowles is a Global Professorial Fellow in the School of Geography at Queen Mary, University of London. An urban Sociologist with research experience in a number of cities, she is the author of many books and papers, most recently, Flip-Flop: A Journey through Globalisation’s Backroads, published by Pluto Press (2014 & 2015) www.flipfloptrail.com and Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London, published by
