Former president Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) this week attended the Forum 2000 Conference in Prague after landing in the Czech Republic, the first destination of her first overseas trip since concluding her second term in office in May.
The country is not a surprising choice. Taiwan-Czech relations have taken a great leap forward, since Czech prime minister Andrej Babis’ administration from 2017 to 2021. Huge progress was made during Tsai’s time in office.
Her trip was intended to express Taiwan’s gratitude to the Czech Republic, while also achieving two diplomatic goals.
The Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) empty promises on its Belt and Road Initiative have contributed to closer ties between Taipei and Prague.
Then-minister of foreign affairs Joseph Wu (吳釗燮) and then-legislative speaker You Si-kun (游錫?) visited the Czech Republic between 2021 and last year, while Czech Chamber of Deputies Speaker Marketa Pekarova Adamova led a delegation of nearly 150 members to Taiwan last year.
Bilateral trade grew 36 percent from 2020 to last year, and the Czech Republic was Taiwan’s fourth-largest investment destination in Europe.
The countries’ friendship received a boost when then-Prague mayor Zdenek Hrib, a member of the Czech Pirate Party, signed a sister-city agreement with Taipei after scrapping a similar agreement with Beijing in 2019.
The CCP had reportedly pressured then-Czech senate president Jaroslav Kubera over his planned visit to Taiwan. Kubera died from a heart attack days before the trip. His family blamed his death on the Chinese embassy in Prague who tried to dissuade him from the trip. After Milos Vystrcil became senate president in February 2020, he met Tsai in Taipei in August that same year.
In January last year, then-president-elect Czech President Petr Pavel became the first European leader to have a direct telephone conversation with Tsai.
The Czech government supported Taiwan during Tsai’s presidency. Relations between the countries have progressed since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It is reasonable for Tsai to choose Prague to start her diplomatic trip after leaving office.
While the CCP’s military drills, code-named “Joint Sword-2024B,” were widely reported by international news outlets, it could not be timelier for Tsai to give a speech in Prague emphasizing that Taiwan is at the front line of authoritarianism, facing the CCP’s threats, and that the country must work with like-minded allies to safeguard regional security, and resist coercion and intimidation.
The international community would sympathize with Taiwan. The Czech Republic can understand the severity of an authoritarian regime after living under the Soviet Union while a part of Czechoslovakia.
The largest opposition party, ANO 2011 — which prioritizes economic benefits, and is pro-Russia, anti-immigrant and anti-EU — has made a comeback. ANO 2011, led by Babis, won the most seats in the European Parliament election in June and Czech’s regional elections last month. The pro-Taiwan Czech Pirate Party quit the ruling coalition after significant losses in the regional elections.
Tsai’s visit can strengthen bonds between the two nations and support the Czech Republic’s ruling coalition. As Tsai has said, Taiwan’s democratization process was similar to that of Eastern Europe. Both countries had seen champions of democracy sacrifice themselves to resist dictatorial rule. That shared experience could unite the countries and sustain mutually beneficial ties.
Chang Meng-jen is chair of Fu Jen Catholic University’s Department of Italian Language and Culture and coordinator of the university’s diplomacy and international affairs program.
Translated by Fion Khan
The conflict in the Middle East has been disrupting financial markets, raising concerns about rising inflationary pressures and global economic growth. One market that some investors are particularly worried about has not been heavily covered in the news: the private credit market. Even before the joint US-Israeli attacks on Iran on Feb. 28, global capital markets had faced growing structural pressure — the deteriorating funding conditions in the private credit market. The private credit market is where companies borrow funds directly from nonbank financial institutions such as asset management companies, insurance companies and private lending platforms. Its popularity has risen since
The Donald Trump administration’s approach to China broadly, and to cross-Strait relations in particular, remains a conundrum. The 2025 US National Security Strategy prioritized the defense of Taiwan in a way that surprised some observers of the Trump administration: “Deterring a conflict over Taiwan, ideally by preserving military overmatch, is a priority.” Two months later, Taiwan went entirely unmentioned in the US National Defense Strategy, as did military overmatch vis-a-vis China, giving renewed cause for concern. How to interpret these varying statements remains an open question. In both documents, the Indo-Pacific is listed as a second priority behind homeland defense and
Every analyst watching Iran’s succession crisis is asking who would replace supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Yet, the real question is whether China has learned enough from the Persian Gulf to survive a war over Taiwan. Beijing purchases roughly 90 percent of Iran’s exported crude — some 1.61 million barrels per day last year — and holds a US$400 billion, 25-year cooperation agreement binding it to Tehran’s stability. However, this is not simply the story of a patron protecting an investment. China has spent years engineering a sanctions-evasion architecture that was never really about Iran — it was about Taiwan. The
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS