Chinese President Xi Jinping will visit Hungary from May 8 to 10, the Hungarian government announced.
Xi is due to arrive in France in early May and will reportedly make a stopover in Serbia just before going to Hungary.
"Between May 8 and 10, the Chinese president will be a guest of Budapest," Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán's chief of staff, Gergely Gulyas, said at a briefing.
"For the first time in twenty years, Budapest will host such a summit. We think it is in the interest of the Hungarian economy [...] to maintain good relations with as many countries as possible," he added, identifying China as one of the world's leading powers.
Despite its small size, the central European country of 9.6 million people has attracted an influx of major Chinese projects in recent years, mostly related to the production of batteries and electric vehicles (EVs).
The Hungarian government has boasted that it has around €15bn worth of ongoing projects originating from the Asian country.
Since returning to power in 2010, Orbán has championed an "Eastern opening" foreign policy, seeking closer economic ties with China, Russia and other Asian countries.
In October last year, the Hungarian prime minister was the only EU leader to attend a summit on Xi's flagship Belt and Road Initiative in Beijing.
The Hungarian leader spoke of his vision of a "sovereign world" in which "the world economy is organized non-ideologically along the lines of mutual benefit."
“Everyone can trade with everyone else. And the task of the individual countries is to build networks of connections that will protect them from unilateral dependencies," said Orban. /BGNES
