Hungary Airlines: Strange New China-Funded Carrier

Will never materialise.

I think Hungary has a clear goal here—covering Europe first with the 737MAX and then acting as a ‘transfer hub’ for big airlines from the East and the West. Basically, they’re positioning themselves as a connector, which is a pretty practical approach.

I'm not surprised by this at all. It just takes a bit of knowledge about what's going on in world politics, especially behind the scenes. Key factors here: - China is building a new world wide empire, called the 'new silk road', and as such it buys itself into all sorts of countries. Particularly African and Asian countries, but also some places in Europe if they get a chance. Serbia used to be a prime example, and now Hungary doesn't come as a surprise. - Hungary is dominated by a populist dictator called Victor Orban. He's as corrupt as it gets in Europe and is hardly on speaking terms with anyone in the rest of the EU anymore. He wasted tons of European funds on his personal hobby projects, like a huge sports temple and train line going nowhere in the village where he grew up. He's also best buddies with Vladimir Putin and expressed his opinion, or rather echoed Putin, that Ukraine and Ukrainians have no right to exist. I bet he'll be best buddies with Trump as he sees to fit right in. A consequence of all this is that Hungary still is the poorest of the EU countries, by far. It's also increasingly difficult for Hungary to get any EU funds for anything, as EU wants Hungary to meet the lowest EU requirements on a few areas first, like independent media, justice and human rights, and uses withholding money as a way to enforce this. They also used that tactic in Poland when the governing Pis-Party (no, seriously) started acting against European values and against human rights. Now Orban is getting creative and looking for new ways to get funds and money. China is always interested in buying itself in any new country, in search of world domination. It still hurts that Malev is gone on the scale of national pride, so if China wants to operate a new 'Hungarian' airline, then they're welcome. I guess the main purpose will be to fly in Chinese workforce, diplomats and spies as most Chinese overseas infrastructure projects are run and executed by Chinese workers. Because it's not just an airline they're planning, there are more Chinese sponsored projects there. Usually the terms of these projects seem favorable in the sort run (China pays everything) but are not so favorable in the long run (China owns a stake and controls and operates critical infrastructure like the power plants and airports that they built), so it will be interesting to see how this plays out. Since the ownership is not to be foreign, you can just be sure that Hungary will allow China to start a 'local' Hungarian company, or several, backed by Chinese money and the Hungarian government to assure any requirements are met. Either that, or Orban will just show the rest of the EU the big finger as he usually does, with Europe not having any real tools weapons to strike back. The only thing that's surprising is their choice of 737-MAX aircraft. I bet that they'll either announce some 787s soon or that they plan on a fuel stop halfway in for example Jalal-Abad in Kyrgyzstan, which also happens to be Chinese built and owned. I won't even be surprised if they register this as a non-European airline, or have their aircraft registered somewhere outside of Europe, or even just have exclusively wet leased Chinese registered aircraft, to avoid having to fly around due to the closure of Russian air space for European carriers. tl;dr: Hungary and EU hate each other and China handily (ab)uses the situation to buy influence. It makes complete sense.

interesting，maybe Hungary airlines also target on EU/ME market，not only China.

Around Budapest there are some Chinese businesses but the really visible immigrant businesses are Vietnamese. Serbia and Hungary are aligned similarly and you'll see a lot more Chinese investment in Serbia and perhaps elsewhere in the Balkans, certainly Yugoslavia was aligned much more closely with China than the Eastern Bloc was. Albania had very close ties. Wizz Air is Hungarian, isn't it?