President Xi Jinping of China on Thursday found another safe zone in a continent increasingly wary of his country, meeting in Budapest with the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orban, the European Union’s perennial odd-man-out as a vocal supporter of warm relations with both China and Russia.
As happened at his previous stop in Serbia, Mr. Xi received a rapturous welcome and was spared from protesters, with his motorcade from the airport on Wednesday evening taking a roundabout route into the Hungarian capital, avoiding Tibetan protesters.
Police banned a protest planned for Thursday in the center of Budapest and a large Tibetan flag that had been hoisted on a hill overlooking the venue of a welcome reception was covered with a Chinese one.
In an article in Magyar Nemzet, which is controlled by Mr. Orban’s governing Fidesz party, Mr. Xi gushed about his “deep friendship” with Hungarian leaders and described Hungary as a trusted “traveling companion” on what he called a “golden voyage” that had taken relations to their “best period of history.” Hungary, he noted, was “the No. 1 target in the central Eastern European region for Chinese investment.”
The Chinese leader’s arrival in Budapest sealed Mr. Orban’s long, steady transformation from an anti-communist liberal firebrand once funded by the Hungarian-born American financier George Soros into one of the Chinese Communist Party leadership’s most fervent admirers and protectors in Europe.
In 2000, during his first term as prime minister, Mr. Orban met in Budapest with the Dalai Lama, the exiled Tibetan leader, but is now a persistent opponent within the European Union of any criticism of Chinese policies in Tibet, Hong Kong and the western region of Xinjiang, home to the persecuted Uyghur minority.
Hungary infuriated fellow members of the European bloc in 2021 by blocking a statement criticizing Beijing’s crackdown on protests in Hong Kong. It has repeatedly worked to water down any condemnation of China’s human rights record, with Mr. Orban scolding fellow E.U. leaders for “frivolous” behavior toward a rising economic and military superpower he sees as vital for Europe’s future prosperity.
Theresa Fallon, director of the Center for Russia, Europe Asia, a Brussels research group, said Mr. Orban had become “China’s go-to person in the E.U. to block or water down anything that they don’t like. He has used up a lot of political chips in Brussels to help China.”
Already a major center for German carmakers, Hungary is now looking to Chinese investment to establish itself as Europe’s premier manufacturing hub for electric vehicles, batteries and other new technologies.
BYD, China’s E.V. juggernaut, announced in December that it would build an assembly plant in Hungary, its first production facility in Europe. Great Wall Motor, another big Chinese E.V. company, is looking into building an even bigger factory in Hungary.
Mr. Orban was the only European Union leader to attend an October gathering in Beijing of world leaders, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, celebrating China’s Belt and Road infrastructure program, Mr. Xi’s pet foreign policy initiative.
Mr. Xi, in his article in Magyar Nemzet, said China wanted to work closely with Hungary on Belt and Road projects and promised to “speed up” construction of a high-speed train between Budapest and the Serbian capital, Belgrade. The railway line, China’s flagship infrastructure project in the region, has been snarled by regulatory and other issues and progressed at a snail’s pace during five years of work.
The shift toward China by Mr. Orban and his once strongly anti-communist Fidesz party began in 2011, soon after he returned to power for a second, now 14 years long, stint as prime minister, with the announcement of a new foreign policy direction known as “Eastern Opening” that was aimed at attracting investment from Asia, primarily China.
“There has been a 180-degree turnaround in Fidesz and its voters,” said Tamas Matura, an expert on Hungarian-Chinese relations at Corvinus University of Budapest. But unlike in Serbia, where opinion polls show strong public support for China, “the majority of people in Hungary are not big supporters,” he added.
Thanks to his party’s tight grip on most Hungarian news media outlets, Mr. Orban has managed to mute domestic criticism of China. But he has faced a delicate balancing act with admirers in the United States, including former President Donald J. Trump, who has made bashing Beijing a central part of his domestic political message.
An annual gathering in Budapest of the Conservative Political Action Committee, a Trump-aligned American organization, has had to tiptoe around the issue of China and focus instead on building what its most recent edition last month declared a “coalition of pro-peace, antiglobalist forces.”
Mr. Trump sent a video message praising Mr. Orban as “a great man” working to “save Western civilization” from “the communists, Marxists and fascists.” He made no mention of China, the world’s largest communist-led country.
Casting China as an ally in the “anti-woke” cause, Zoltan Kiszelly of a Fidesz-funded Hungarian research group, told Magyar Nemzet on Thursday that Hungary and China shared a commitment to family values, opposition to immigration and support of “peace.”
Barnabas Heincz contributed reporting from Budapest.