This week, a senior Czech politician, Milos Vystrcil, visited Taiwan and

delivered a powerful speech to the parliament in Taipei, echoing John F.

Kennedy‘s “Ich bin ein Berliner” — or, as Vystrcil put it, “I am Taiwanese.”
The reaction of Chinese state media and the government was instant. Chinese
Foreign Minister Wang Yi, on a visit to Germany, threatened to make Vystrcil,
the speaker of the upper house of the Czech parliament, “pay a heavy price for
his short-sighted behavior and political opportunism.” Wang’s outburst triggered
immediate pushback not only from the Czech foreign ministry but also from
German Chancellor Angela Merkel and the French.

The affair, which has turned the Czech Republic into the European Union’s
most outspoken critic of Chinese hegemony, is refreshing at a time when many
reflexively associate post-communist Central Europe with “illiberal democracy”
and a flagging commitment to Western alliances.

Vystrcil’s sojourn in Taiwan follows an extraordinary reversal of the Chinese-

Czech relationship. The Czech Republic’s current president, Milos Zeman, has
visited China five times during his time in office. When Xi Jinping arrived in
Prague for a state visit in March 2016, he received a grander and more
deferential welcome than any head of state in the Czech Republic’s post-1993
history. That made for a stark contrast with the stance set by the Czech
Republic’s first president, Vaclav Havel, who died in 2011 and whose frequent
displays of friendship with Tibet’s Dalai Lama left Chinese officials apoplectic.
Czech critics of China, who pointed out the regime’s poor human rights record
and treatment of religious minorities, were long dismissed as naive. Moral
posturing should not stand in the way of the coming investment and trade boom
led by China, the pragmatic argument went. Spearheaded by the investment
conglomerate CEFC Group, whose chairman Ye Jianming even served as
Zeman’s economic adviser, the Chinese heavily advertised their economic
presence in the country.
Yet the promised cornucopia of business opportunities never materialized.
CEFC might have made conspicuous investments into football clubs and
breweries, but Taiwan-based companies alone have invested 14 times as much
in Czech manufacturing than China. It turns out the naive ones weren’t the
followers of Havel’s principled approach to China but those who trusted Chinese
promises.
Ye’s fall from grace with the Beijing regime in 2018 weakened the network of
business interests around Zeman. Czech public opinion has been critical of
China, too. In a poll conducted last November, China’s favorability among
Czechs trailed that of European Union member states, the United States,
Turkey and even Russia. Seventy-one percent of Czechs blame Beijing’s
secretiveness for the spread of the coronavirus.
The disillusionment with China started at the city level. In early 2019, the mayor
of Prague, Zdenek Hrib, refused to “disinvite” a Taiwanese representative from
a meeting with the diplomatic corps, ignoring escalating Chinese pressure.
Later that year, he ended Prague’s partnership with Beijing over a dispute on
the one-China policy, which the agreement between the two cities included and
Beijing refused to drop. In response, the Chinese threatened to withhold funds
for a Prague soccer club they had purchased in 2015. In January 2020, Hrib
signed a partnership agreement between Prague and Taipei.
Speaker Vystrcil’s trip to Taiwan was originally supposed to be taken earlier this
year by his predecessor, Jaroslav Kubera. The reaction of the Chinese
embassy and of China-friendly politicians to Kubera’s decision bordered on
extortion. “Czech companies whose representatives visit Taiwan with Chairman
Kubera will not be welcome in China or with the Chinese people,” the
embassy warned in a letter. Shortly thereafter, Kubera died of a heart attack,
which his family blames on Chinese pressure.
China’s ham-handed diplomacy has now led to exactly the opposite of what
Beijing intended. The foreign ministry dismissed Chinese pleas to bring Hrib
and Kubera in line. Instead, the Czechs were among the first to stop issuing
Schengen visas in China following the outbreak of covid-19. In May, the Czech
government and the Trump administration signed a joint declaration on the
security of 5G networks — implicitly aimed at Chinese tech giants Huawei and
ZTE. Other than a lot of huffing and puffing, there has been no retaliation. The
economic and political leverage that Beijing exercises over Prague is essentially
nil, regardless of the dramatic asymmetry in size.
The Czech Republic proves that the costs of a principled, values-based posture
toward China are much smaller than the proponents of Europe’s current
waffling between talk of “partnership” and “systemic» rivalry. E.U.-wide, Chinese
investment accounts for less than 1 percent of total foreign direct investment,
trailing Hong Kong and Singapore. Czechs are waking up. How long will it take
the rest of Europe to do the same?
Dalibor Rohac is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.