Budapest has renamed streets around the planned site of a leading Chinese university campus to protest an “unwanted” project forced on it by the government of the prime minister, Viktor Orbán. Four street signs at the site now bear the names Free Hong Kong Road, Uyghur Martyrs’ Road, Dalai Lama Road, and Bishop Xie Shiguang Road, the last referring to a persecuted Chinese Catholic priest. “We still hope the project won’t happen but if it does then it will have to put up with these names,” the city’s mayor, Gergely Karacsony, told a joint press conference with the district mayor, Krisztina Baranyi. Currently derelict, the area is to house Fudan university’s first European campus in a 500,000 sq metre (5m sq ft) complex by 2024, according to a deal signed between Hungary and the Shanghai-based university’s president. This is the sort of change we also need around Chinese embassies the world over. But the city government best be warned the university’s location could change in response, hopefully not without a further change in street names at the new location.
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