Budapest announced Wednesday that the streets surrounding the site of a planned Chinese university’s Hungarian campus will be renamed after the victims of China’s human rights abuses.
Gergely Karacsony, the Hungarian capital’s mayor, is a liberal political figure who has been vocally opposing Prime Minister Victor Orban‘s decision to open a campus of China’s Fudan University, according to Reuters.
The new names of the roads adjacent to the would-be Chinese university’s campus make references to the Uyghur genocide, protests in Hong Kong, a spiritual leader of Tibet in exile Dalai Lama and a jailed Chinese Catholic bishop, Xie Shiguang.
Road of Uyghur martyrs
Free Hongkong Road
Dalai Lama Road
Bishop Xie Shiguang Road– Opposition-led Budapest shows the middle finger by renaming streets around the area where PM Orbán’s gov’t is building a campus for China’s Fudan University. https://t.co/khxHk0SfIb
THREAD???? pic.twitter.com/7xcu8soJU0
— Szabolcs Panyi (@panyiszabolcs) June 1, 2021
The updated signposts read “Road of Uyghur martyrs,” “Free Hongkong Road,” “Dalai Lama Road” and “Bishop Xie Shiguang Road.”
“This Fudan project would put in doubt many of the values that Hungary committed itself to 30 years ago” at the fall of Communism,” Karacsony said of his opposition to Orban’s plans, according to Reuters. (RELATED: Government Officials Drive The George Soros Foundation Out Of Hungary)
66% of Hungarians are opposed to the prospect of hosting the Chinese university in the capital, while only 27% expressed their support for the plans, a Tuesday opinion poll by Republikon Institute showed, according to Reuters.
The Hungarian prime minister’s political adversaries reportedly accuse him of cozying up to China.
Orban previously received harsh criticism for taking $2.1 billion in Chinese loans to reconstruct the Budapest-Belgrade railway and for what has been dubbed a hasty approval of a Chinese coronavirus vaccine, Reuters reported.