The news that Hungary and China have signed a security pact, following a visit by to Budapest by Wang Xiaohong, Minister of Public Security, has been a long time in the making. In 2012, two years after beginning his second term as Prime Minister, Viktor Orban formally re-orientated Hungary’s economic and foreign policy under the slogan of the ‘Eastern Opening’. Orban understood the frustration that had returned him to power with a two-thirds majority in Parliament. Two decades of integration with western Europe had made plenty of Hungarians prosperous, but not the majority.

The introduction of the free market in Hungary was accompanied by the mass closure of businesses, and unemployment rocketed. Orban’s electoral strongholds in rural Hungary paid a particularly high price during the economic transition. The eventual arrival of EU subsidies has primarily benefited only the largest and most nimble producers. Worse was to come. The 2008 economic crisis, and the devaluation of the Forint, traumatised a swathe of the middle class who had taken out loans pegged to western currencies. At the same time, Goldman Sachs and other forecasters celebrated the rise of the Brics, (Brazil, Russia, India and China). For Orban and his supporters, Hungary had made a poor choice in 1989 when it put all its economic eggs in the European basket(case).

When Orban returned to power in 2010, he set about building new partnerships with the growing economies in the East and Far East and this brought immediate benefits. Russia provided cheap loans and expertise to modernise and expand Hungary’s only nuclear power station. Trade with Turkey keeps growing in double figure percentages and has now passed $4 billion dollars annually (£3.2 billion), and China has continuously pumped money into Hungary. The Chinese are now funding the reconstruction of the critical railway line linking Budapest and the Serbian capital Belgrade, cutting travel time in half, which should boost trade and tourism between Hungary and South-East Europe. Chinese firms have also found a welcome base in Hungary. Huawei, for example – denounced by both London and Washington as a dubious front for Chinese intelligence gathering – has faced no such criticism in Budapest and has reciprocated by building its key European supply centre just outside the capital.

Other major investments have arrived in Hungary, and where the money flows the political alliances invariably follow. Hungary arguably now has better relations with Russia, Turkey, the central Asian states and China than it does with anywhere in western Europe or America – which has forbidden Orban from even visiting the White House. Budapest also appreciates the fact that unlike Brussels – which constantly hectors Hungary for not conforming to its various shibboleths – the Eurasian regimes have no interest in telling the Hungarian administration how to run the country.

Orban’s decision to look eastwards is rooted, however, in a much deeper and older tradition. The Hungarians were one of the last peoples to arrive in Europe, from the steppes of Central Asia. Their first chroniclers celebrated their links with the Huns, (Attila remains a popular Hungarian first name), while the nobility partly justified their privileges on the grounds that they were the descended from the free people of the East who had never been forced into servitude by the Roman Empire. When their various revolts against their Habsburg overlords failed, the leaders always first fled eastwards for refuge. From the late 19th century until 1945 there was even a mania among a swathe of the Hungarian elite who claimed that they were just one branch of a vast Turanian nation of eastern peoples which extended all the way to Japan and stood in vigorous contrast to the decadence of Western Europe.

The decision in 1920 under the Treaty of Trianon to carve-up the Hungarian kingdom, reducing it in size by 70 per cent, deepened resentment towards the victorious western allies of world war one. The brutal Communist dictatorship that was imposed on the country from 1948 drove the Turanian idea underground, (although it has had a mini revival recently). Party apparatchiks were interested in only one eastern capital, Moscow, which they regarded with predictable obeisance. Meanwhile, most dissidents dreamed of the normality, and the prosperity, that Western Europe appeared to have achieved. Nevertheless, there was still the hackneyed official rhetoric and various intellectual currents that painted the West as a threat to Hungary. All this has left a legacy that Orban’s regime has cleverly tapped into. Orban eagerly seized the chance to study in Oxford in 1990 but then found the experience entirely dispiriting. Many of his fellow countrymen have been equally disillusioned.

Hungary, though, has emphatically not turned its back on Europe. Money from Brussels is still critical to its growth prospects and around 80 per cent of its exports still go to EU member states. When it suits Orban – as it did during the migrant crisis of 2015 – he presents Hungary as the bulwark of western civilisation and lauds his country’s Christian heritage. Since 1989, Hungarians have once again been able to celebrate – every year on 20 August – the decision of their first King, Saint Stephen in the year 1000 to embrace western Christianity and jettison eastern, pagan beliefs. This also contrasts Hungary with her Orthodox neighbours in the Balkans and Russia. Orban has no interest in emulating Putin’s antipathy to Europe and shares none of his paranoias. But he still enjoys looking for an alliance wherever he can find one. Orban’s critics regard his enthusiasm for China as yet more evidence of his authoritarianism. That is a mistake. Closer relations with China simply reflect his frustrations with the West’s current governments, a narrow understanding of Hungary’s national interest, and its awkward history of always being pulled in two directions at once.