This Budapest academic institution may help Chinese intelligence

Little is known about the Budapest-based China-CEE Institute, but experts say that it could have ties with Chinese intelligence services.

The China-CEE Institute in Budapest pays thousands of euros to Central European academics to write studies on the political, economic, and social events in their respective country. This alone would not be interesting, but the institute in the Hungarian capital is funded by the Chinese government and may have links to Chinese intelligence, writes HVG.

According to several Czech experts,

there is a possibility that the China-CEE Institute is helping Chinese intelligence. The Budapest-based institution is nothing more than a spy organisation disguised as a scientific workshop, and the studies that are commissioned from researchers are in fact reports.

The China-CEE Institute was founded in Budapest in 2017 by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Other concerns

This is not the only institution that has recently raised concerns in public life in Hungary. Direkt36 has examined how China’s influence in Hungary has strengthened over the past ten years with the help of the Hungarian government. They found that the Budapest campus of Fudan could be considered a risk to national security.

“Fudan is not simply a top university, it is also an important recruitment pool for the Chinese state party. More than a quarter of faculty and students are certainly Chinese Communist Party members, according to a recently leaked party member database.”

This database revealed that alleged Chinese Communist Party members have embedded themselves inside some of the world’s biggest companies, including defence contractors, banks, and pharmaceutical companies.

Moreover,

the university’s Institute of International Studies has been cooperating with China’s foreign intelligence, and in 2011, Fudan University even launched its own spy school.

However, Levente Horváth, Chief Adviser to the Governor of the Hungarian National Bank, who officially coordinates the Fudan project, argued that the Chinese Communist Party did not influence free thinking and freedom of research at Fudan University.

The famous Shanghai University’s first campus outside China could open in Budapest in 2024 with five to six thousand students and five hundred teachers.

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Source: hvg.hu, direkt36.hu