Hungary ‘safest location’ for East-West cooperation, says Minister Szijjártó in Beijing

Hungary is “the safest location” for East-West cooperation, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade Péter Szijjártó said, addressing the second China International Supply Chain Expo (CISCE) in Beijing on Tuesday.

Halfway between Washington and Beijing

“We offer the safest place for Eastern and Western companies to work together in Europe,” Szijjártó said at the fair’s opening, where Hungary is the guest of honor.

He expressed concern over efforts to divide the world into blocs again and said those initiatives were “totally against” Hungary’s national interests. Hungary’s goal, he added, was for connectivity to characterise the coming decades.

He said the hope was for East and West to cooperate in a “civilised manner, based on mutual respect and aiming at mutual benefits.” He outlined the government’s strategy of economic neutrality, adopted in the context of Hungary’s historical experience, with a view to the country’s export-oriented economy and its geographical location halfway between Washington and Beijing.

Szijjártó said the government’s economic neutrality strategy dovetailed with China’s Belt and Road Initiative and provided a stable basis for economic growth.

He said that Hungary was now the “number one” destination for Chinese investments in Europe, noting that CATL was setting up the biggest battery plant on the continent in Hungary while BYD was building a factory that would turn out several hundred thousand EVs a year. He added that more Chinese investments are in the pipeline.

Szijjártó said those Chinese investments supported Hungary’s economic growth, creating jobs, bringing cutting-edge technologies, raising the level of value-added, and shortening supply chains. The government’s strategy of economic neutrality is “the right one,” he said, adding that strengthening cooperation between China and Hungary would produce a “fantastic” year for the Hungarian economy in 2025.

Chinese-Hungarian Collaboration to Connect Eastern and Western Digital Payment Systems

Two major digital payment technology providers, Macau Pass Group Holdings Limited of Macau and Hungary’s Cardnet Group, announced today their strategic alliance to establish the BRIDGE Project.

The BRIDGE Project aims to create a technology platform serving both Asian and European digital payment infrastructures under a shared ecosystem: the Bilateral Retail Interoperability Digital Gateway Ecosystem (BRIDGE). This platform will seamlessly integrate Asian mobile payment systems with European contactless payment networks. By combining the expertise of Macau Pass and Cardnet, the project seeks to simplify and expedite cross-border payment transactions, enable real-time currency conversion, ensure transaction security, and comply with the highest financial, data protection, and security standards.