November 29th (AMSP/CGTN) – – The Second China International Supply Chain Expo opened in Beijing on Tuesday, with Hungary designated as the guest country of honor, for the first time.
To that end, CGTN’s Wang Mengjie interviewed Peter Szijjarto, Hungary’s Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, to discuss the expo’s role as a platform for participating nations.
“We are really honored by the fact that we can be starting here as a guest of honor. This was agreed during your president’s visit to Hungary earlier this year, when we declared our relationship as an all-whether strategic partnership,” Hungarian Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Peter Szijjarto, told CGTN’s Wang Mengjie.
“Hungary is gonna be the representative, I guess, the one on this very timely and relevant event. Why time is relevant? Because there are many in the western world that would like to decouple, the East from the West, the West from the East; this is something that we don’t like. We don’t want the world to be divided into blocks. This is something that would be totally against our interests, because historically, we have experienced such a period when the world was divided into blocks, we lost a lot on them. So, therefore, we are calling for connectivity to be the phenomenon which would describe the upcoming period of a month or years and activity, meaning that a civilized East to West cooperation must be maintained,” ha said.
Regarding the decision of the EU to impose tariffs on China’s electric vehicles, the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary took issue with this decision. “That’s a very bad decision. It’s an extremely bad, harmful and dangerous decision. There were five countries voting against, among them is Hungary. This is a purely ideological and political decision, has nothing to do with the reality. And there’s nothing to do with democracy, because there were only 12 countries out of the 27 supporting this decision. Unfortunately, under the leadership of this current European Commission, the European economy has lost a lot of competitiveness. Now we see a realistic danger that this loss will be continue,” said Peter Szijjarto.
As Donald Trump has recently said he would propose 10 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods, Peter Szijjarto expressed his thought. “I remember when President Trump was in office for the first time between 2016 and 2020. During that time, he led serious negotiations with the Chinese counterparts about a trade deal. If he had won the elections, he might have been able to complete that deal,” he said, hoping that there will be a rational deal between China and the United States because, he revealed, China and the United States are the two most important trading and investment partners of Hungary outside of the European Union.
“And for such a country with an open economy like Hungary, with our size, with our location, with our capacities, it would be very disadvantaged if our two most important trading and investment partners would quarrel with each other, not to speak about their possible trade. So that’s why we hope that a good deal will be made between the two of you, ensuring the proper operation of the global economic system,” he added.
As this year marks the beginning of the upgrade of Sino-Hungary relations to a new era of all-weather comprehensive strategic partnership, CGTN’s Wang Mengjie wanted to hear from Peter Szijjarto, regarding the impact that this will have on bilateral ties in the future.
“With this format of cooperation, we have opened up the gates for practical cooperation on all fields from automotive, to the Confucius institutes, from agriculture to food industry. We are working on the expansion of our civic aviation contacts. Currently, there are 21 flights on a week between seven cities in China and Budapest. We would like to increase that number,” said the Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of Hungary, underscoring that they are building the cooperation in every possible layer.
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