Foreign Minister: “We would have lost a lot if we had not cooperated with China”

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó met his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi in New York. After their talks, Szijjártó said that Hungary has gained a lot from cooperation with China in recent years.

“We would have lost a lot if we had not cooperated with China. If we had given in to the liberal mainstream, whose proxies can also be found in Hungary, who constantly told us not to cooperate with China, that we should cut off relations between Europe and China, and that cooperation with China was wrong. If we had listened to them, we would have missed out on a lot of opportunities, a lot of chances and a lot of very serious economic results,” the Hungarian Foreign Minister emphasized.

He pointed out that

Chinese companies brought the most investment to Hungary in 2020, 2023, and 2024, and that over the past ten years 54 large investments worth more than €17 billion have come from the East Asian country, creating some 40,000 jobs.

He said that these have enabled Hungary to be at the forefront of the global automotive technology revolution, something that has not happened for a very long time.

Szijjártó pointed out that China is the second largest source of imports for the Hungarian economy, with an annual trade volume of more than 10 billion dollars for several years. He recalled that last year, after the coronavirus pandemic, the number of overnight stays by Chinese tourists in Hungary exceeded half a million again, which is a record, and there are 21 flights a week from seven major Chinese cities to Budapest airport. He also emphasized that Hungary exports the most food to China from the Central European region.

“The fact is that we are a landlocked, small to medium sized country, not abundant in energy resources, so for us, our deeply integrated participation in international trade is key to the performance of our economy. Therefore, the most important thing for us is to ensure that world trade can function smoothly,” the minister explained.

Therefore, breaking the world into blocs is against our interests. And connectivity, interconnectivity, global economic cooperation based on mutual respect, is in our interest. And we are working with China in this regard,”

he added.

The Foreign Minister said that the European liberal mainstream is pursuing a “suicidal policy” here too, which has caused serious damage to the continent’s economy, for example through Chinese electric car tariffs, which have been vigorously opposed by the biggest players in the automotive industry.

“In Hungary we have become a meeting point for Eastern and Western investments, we have benefited a lot from cooperation with China, so it is in our interest that this cooperation should be maintained, and not only that Hungarian-Chinese cooperation should be maintained, but also that cooperation between China and the European Union should finally become normal, and that global trade should not be about breaking into blocs, about economic cold war, but about effective cooperation based on respect,” he concluded.

Via MTI, Featured photo via Facebook/Péter Szijjártó