Magic Prague

Prague mayor Zdenek Hrib shrugs off Chinese hysteria as he signs twinning agreement with Taipei

By Matthew Day
Mayor of Prague Zdenek Hrib, left, and Taipei city mayor Ko Wen-je singed a partnership agreement between the two cities.

The Czech capital Prague branded China "unreliable" and a “bully” as it scorned the economic might of Beijing to sign a partnership agreement with Taipei in a move seen as evidence of a cooling of attitudes in Europe towards the lure of Chinese investment.
Zdenek Hrib, the city’s mayor, signed the agreement increasing co-operation with the Taiwanese capital on Monday knowing that it could deepen Chinese anger with Prague.
The rift began when the Czech capital challenged a clause in an existing partnership agreement with Beijing requiring it to accept the “one-China” policy, which claims Taiwan as Chinese territory.
The challenge prompted Beijing to tear up the partnership agreement and to cancel planned tours of China by Czech orchestras.
“I think that all people should be aware that China is not a reliable business partner because it cancelled already arranged tours and cancelled contracts already signed just to bully the Prague orchestras,” Mr Hrib told The Telegraph.
“The Chinese reaction has been hysterical.
“Partners should treat each other with respect but we had a partner that did not do that,” he added. “For example, they stopped responding to us. Why should you have a partner that won’t even speak to you?”
In 2018, some 620,000 Chinese flocked to the city but Mr Hrib said any drop in the number of tourists from China “would not be much of a loss” to the city.
The dispute reflects growing question marks in Europe over the merits of Chinese involvement in local economies.
In Montenegro the economy is struggling to service the debt of a massive Chinese loan to build a motorway that forms part of Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Even Milos Zeman, the Czech president, who unsettled many of fellow citizens with his ardour for China, appears to be losing his enthusiasm for the country.
Last week he said he would not attend a summit in China of the heads of Asian and Eastern European states, saying that China “did not fulfil its promise” when it came to investment.
“There is a change in the way people perceive China,” said Mr Hrib.
“There were a lot of promises made about investment and the economic benefits from the ties between the Czech Republic and China, but after a few years it was quite obvious that these promises have not been fulfilled and that only a fraction of the investments took place.
"And those investments that did took place were not real investments, just acquisitions. Nothing that created job opportunities or knowledge transfer.”

Zdeněk Hřib: the Czech mayor who defied China

By refusing to expel a Taiwanese diplomat, the Prague mayor has joined the ranks of local politicians confronting contentious national policies

By Robert Tait in Prague

Zdeněk Hřib of the Czech Republic’s Pirate party.

Zdeněk Hřib had been Prague’s mayor for little more than a month when he came face-to-face with the Czech capital’s complex entanglement with China.
Hosting a meeting with foreign diplomats in the city, Hřib was asked by the Chinese ambassador to expel their Taiwanese counterpart from the gathering in deference to Beijing’s ‘one China’ policy, under which it claims sovereignty over the officially independent state of Taiwan.
Given recent Chinese investments in the Czech Republic, which have included the acquisition of Slavia Prague football club, a major brewery and a stake in a private TV station, the fledgling mayor could have easily agreed. 

Prague city council had, under the preceding mayor, signed a twin cities agreement with Beijing that explicitly recognised the one China policy.
Instead, Hřib refused and the Taiwanese diplomat stayed.
The episode is a rare case of a local politician defying the might of a global superpower while making a principled stand against a national government policy that has promoted Chinese ties.

Hřib has since gone further, demanding Beijing officials drop the clause stating Prague’s support for the one China policy in the 2016 deal and threatening to scrap the arrangement if they refuse.
“This article is a one-sided declaration that Prague agrees with and respects the one China policy and such a statement has no place in the sister cities agreement,” Hřib said in an interview in Prague’s new town hall, close to the city’s historic tourist district, which draws an increasing number of visitors from China.
“The one China policy is a complicated matter of foreign politics between two countries. But we are solving our sister cities relationship on the level of two capital cities.”

Hřib, a 38-year-old doctor who spent a medical training internship in Taiwan, is challenging the Czech president, Miloš Zeman, who has visited China several times, installed a Chinese adviser at his office in Prague castle and declared that he wanted to learn “how to stabilise society” from the country’s communist rulers.
The dispute has catapulted the unassuming Hřib to household name status in Czech politics, helped by Prague’s position as an international cultural draw and its outsize share of national resources.
Hřib’s rise from obscurity is striking because Czech mayors, unlike their US and Polish counterparts, are not directly elected. 

He became mayor of a coalition administration after his Pirate party, a liberal group with roots in civil society, finished second in last October’s municipal elections.
He says he is merely adopting the policy of his party and its two coalition partners in taking decisions that are cooling Prague’s relations with Beijing.

Zdeněk Hřib and Lobsang Sangay at the Old Town Hall in Prague. 

In March, his administration restored the practice of flying the Tibetan flag from Prague’s town hall, reinstating a tradition begun in the era of the Czech Republic’s first post-communist president, Václav Havel, that was dropped by the previous city administration. 

At the same time, in a move tailor-made to infuriate Beijing, Hřib hosted the visiting head of Tibet’s government-in-exile, Lobsang Sangay.
An official visit to the Taiwanese capital, Taipei, followed. 

During the visit, Hřib criticised China for harvesting organs from political prisoners belonging to the Falun Gong movement.
Threats of retaliation came soon afterwards. 

A planned tour of China by the Prague Philharmonia in September is in jeopardy after it rebuffed Beijing’s demands to repudiate the mayor.
Iva Nevoralova, the orchestra’s spokesperson, likened the request to the actions of Czechoslovakia’s former communist regime, which pressured artists to denounce Havel’s dissident Charter 77 movement as the price for being allowed to perform.

Members of the Prague Philharmonia. 

Speaking to the Guardian, Hřib questioned whether Prague’s arrangement with Beijing was a fair relationship and criticised China’s “social scoring” system for good citizenship. 

He suggested that investment from Taiwan, with its western-style democracy and record of technological innovation, offered greater benefit.
The mayor has won praise for restoring the Czech Republic’s image as a champion of human rights and self-determination at a time when its politics have been dominated by the populist messages of Zeman and Andrej Babiš, the anti-immigration billionaire prime minister.
“It is empowering to see that a mayor of Prague can have a principled position, despite large portions of the Czech political establishment being co-opted by the narratives spread by the totalitarian government of China,” said Jakub Janda, executive director of the European Values thinktank, which monitors anti-western influence in Czech politics and beyond.


Jakub Janda@_JakubJanda
THREAD:
CZECH RESISTANCE TO CHINESE HARASSMENT:
We have a good Mayor of Prague. He supports Tibet + Taiwan. When the PRC ambassador tried to force him to have a TW diplomat kicked out of a diplomatic meeting hosted by Prague City Council, he declined.
2,268
8:59 PM - Apr 28, 2019

Jiří Pehe, the director of New York University in Prague, said Hřib was using the mayor’s office to reassert the values of Havel, who died in 2011. 

“Everyone in this country knows that when you support Taiwan and Tibet, you’re saying exactly what Havel used to say,” said Pehe. 

“This was intentional on the part of the Pirate party as soon as he took over Prague. They are saying that the Czech Republic has a special history of fighting against communism and you should respect it.”

Taiwan is the kind of society that Liu Xiaobo envisioned for China

What a New Sculpture Reveals About Tensions Between China and Taiwan

By SUYIN HAYNES/TAIPEI

A sculpture of the Chinese Nobel peace prize recipient Liu Xiaobo who passed away one year ago can be seen outside City Hall on July 13, 2018, in Taipei, Taiwan.

Artist Aihua Cheng has worked feverishly for the past four months in her scenic Baisha Bay studio on Taiwan’s northern coast. 

For her latest project, the oil painter and sculptor read the extended works of the late Chinese Nobel Peace Laureate Liu Xiaobo—while creating a three-part sculpture dedicated to the writer and dissident, who died as a political prisoner last year. 

“I completed the work just yesterday,” she told TIME, shortly before her creation was shown to the public for the first time outside Taipei’s city hall on July 13.
Titled I Have No Enemies, Cheng’s piece incorporates a line drawing of Liu looking out over a bronze open book inscribed with his writings. 

“I hope that his books and thoughts can continue impacting China,” she says. 

Unveiled on the one-year anniversary of Liu’s death, the sculpture was planned by exiled democracy activist Wu’er Kaixi as a tribute to his former mentor. 

“Taiwanese people joining us in erecting this sculpture are telling China that we have not forgotten our values,” says Wu’er, who was forced to flee China after the Tiananmen Square protests and settled in Taiwan in 1996.
That message will resonate with many on this island, which began to embrace democracy after nearly four decades of martial law ended in 1987. 

The mainland still views Taiwan, an island of 23 million people that lies 112 miles off China’s coast, as its sovereign territory despite the island’s breakaway in 1949 at the end of the Chinese Civil War.
Supported by Reporters Without Borders, the crowdfunded sculpture project is intended to represent the ideals of freedom and democracy championed by Liu in his co-authored Charter 08 manifesto. 

Liu encouraged Chinese citizens to envisage a democratic future, “a modern means for achieving government truly ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’” 

That document ultimately led to his arrest in 2009, his Nobel Peace Prize the following year and his imprisonment until he died from late-stage liver cancer.
But the commemoration of a Chinese dissident comes at a time when tensions with Beijing are already running high. 

Taiwan is struggling for international recognition as China ramps up efforts to isolate the island. 

The day after the statue was unveiled, the head of China’s Taiwan Affairs office released a statement saying that “the vain separatist attempts for ‘Taiwan independence’ will only lead to a dead end.” Add an unpredictable U.S. President and a snowballing trade war between the world’s two biggest economies into the mix and you have a cross-strait relationship that is more fragile—and perhaps more dangerous—than ever.
When the news of Liu’s death was announced last year, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen tweeted a statement expressing Taiwan’s hopes that Chinese people could one day “enjoy the God-given rights of freedom and democracy.” 

The statement, issued in both Chinese and English, was seen as an affront to Beijing—much like Tsai’s presidential victory in January 2016.
Tsai’s Democratic Progressive Party promised “an era of new politics in Taiwan,” breaking with the Nationalist Party (KMT) government policy, which favored closer ties with China. 

Under the 1992 Consensus, China and Taiwan agreed that there is one China—allowing each other to disagree about the status of Taiwan. 

Tsai’s election changed that. 

Her party supports independence and refuses to acknowledge the Consensus. 

Since Tsai took office in May 2016, China’s dictator Xi Jinping has not met with her but has continued relations with the KMT opposition party.
The lack of any diplomatic relations with Beijing does not seem to have deterred Tsai.

“She will continue to build on the belief that democracy can be integrated into an ethnically Chinese society and the idea that Taiwan can be an example to China in this sense,” says Sheryn Lee, a lecturer in security studies at Macquarie University.
Taiwan looks like the kind of society that Liu Xiaobo envisioned for China. That makes tributes to him contentious. 

According to Reuters, supporters of him and his widow Liu Xia were pressured by Chinese authorities to not hold any commemoration events. 

And although Liu Xia was released from eight years of house arrest on July 10, the move came amid a growing crackdown on dissidents in China. 

A day later, China sentenced prominent democracy activist Qin Yongmin to 13 years of imprisonment for “subversion of state power.”
As well as quashing dissent at home, Xi’s newly consolidated grip on power has allowed him to increase pressure on Taiwan—just as Tsai is trying to strengthen her position ahead of midterm elections in November. 

“Beijing probably wants to remind the Taiwanese public that they are paying a price for supporting Tsai and her party,” says Richard C. Bush, former Chairman of the American Institute in Taiwan, the island’s de facto U.S. embassy.
A visible reminder of that price is the ratcheting up of military actions in the Taiwan Strait. 

In April, Chinese state media reported that the navy held its largest ever military display in a spectacular show of force in the South China Sea as well as the first naval military exercises with live fire drills in the strait since 2015.
Analysts say such exercises signal Beijing’s intention to send a message to the U.S. amid rising trade tensions and closer ties to Taiwan. 

While the U.S. formally endorses the “one China” policy, it has had an unofficial relationship with Taiwan since 1979. 

And President Donald Trump has broken an un-precedented series of protocols since his Inauguration, such as accepting a congratulatory phone call from Tsai; passing the Taiwan Travel Act, which encourages U.S. officials to visit the island; and unveiling a new $250 million de facto embassy building in Taipei. 

“No one really expected the level of interference that Trump had. He broke all of the rules that have been set down with China-Taiwan relations,” says Lee.

These moves have also been accompanied by gestures of U.S. military support for Taiwan, right under Beijing’s nose. 

Last year, Trump approved a deal to sell Taiwan $1.42 billion worth of arms in a massive deal that was immediately condemned by China. 

On July 7, two U.S. warships passed through the Taiwan Strait—merely a day after Washington imposed tariffs on $34 billion of Chinese imports in the last shot fired in the superpower showdown.
Despite Trump’s seemingly strong commitment to Taiwan, the backdrop of a trade war has nevertheless worried local politicians. 

“We share the same fundamental values as the U.S.,” says Huang Kuo-chang, chairman of the pro-independence New Power Party. 

“But we are not so naive as to be unable to understand that sometimes we become the bargaining chip between China and the United States.”
China has also accelerated efforts to diplomatically isolate the island. 

Since taking office, Tsai has lost allies in Burkina Faso, the Dominican Republic, Panama, and São Tomé and Príncipe, leaving only 18 others worldwide. 

“Some say that in a few years, the number of allies Taiwan has could drop to zero,” says Rwei-Ren Wu, a research fellow at Taipei’s Academia Sinica. 

A prominent advocate for Taiwanese independence, Wu was barred from entering Hong Kong to speak at a conference last year.
Taiwan aspires to be a member of the U.N., but is not officially recognized. 

In May, for the second year in a row, it was denied access to the World Health Organization’s annual assembly—a move denounced by both Tsai’s government and independent watchdogs as a surrender to pressure from Beijing.
That pressure has started to affect private companies. 

In recent months, airlines and retailers have clashed with Beijing over references to disputed territories, including Taiwan and Tibet. 

In January, authorities shut down the Chinese websites of Marriott International after it listed Taiwan as an individual nation; in May, Gap apologized for a T-shirt with a map of China that omitted Taiwan. 

Beijing has also demanded that foreign airlines edit references to Taiwan to reflect the island as part of the mainland. 

Dismissed by the White House as “Orwellian nonsense,” U.S. airlines including Delta and American now have a July 25 deadline to comply with Beijing’s line on the issue.
In Taipei, the memorial sculpture is accompanied by an empty chair, symbolizing Liu’s absence at the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize ceremony because of his imprisonment. 

Cheng acknowledges that a sculpture alone is unlikely to impact China. 

“But I think the words, the thoughts of Liu Xiaobo will,” Cheng says. 

The sculpture—previewed only briefly on July 13—is still waiting on permanent approval from the city. 

For Taiwan too, the road ahead looks uncertain. 

“There is no reason for us to be treated as second-class global citizens,” says Huang. 

“If our goodwill toward China is unilateral, what do we gain from maintaining the status quo?”

Criminal Nation

China murdered Nobel laureate Liu Xiaobo: Reporters Without Borders
KYODO

In this Saturday file photo provided by the Shenyang Municipal Information Office, Liu Xia, wife of jailed Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, holds a portrait of him during his funeral at a funeral parlor in Shenyang in northeastern China's Liaoning Province. The photo shows (from left) Liu Hui, younger brother of Liu Xia, Liu Xia and Liu Xiaoxuan, younger brother of Liu Xiaobo holding his cremated remains.

RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire : “We can clearly state that Liu Xiaobo was murdered by the lack of care.” 

TAIPEI – Reporters Without Borders (Reporters Sans Frontières), which advocates freedom of information around the world, on Tuesday accused Chinese authorities of having murdered Nobel Peace Prize-winning dissident Liu Xiaobo by denying him proper medical care during his incarceration.
“We can clearly state that Liu Xiaobo was murdered by the lack of care,” RSF Secretary-General Christophe Deloire told a news conference held to formally launch an RSF bureau in Taipei, the Paris-headquartered media rights watchdog’s first in Asia.
Deloire rejected the claim that Chinese authorities did not know that Liu, who died last Thursday of multiple organ failure related to liver cancer, was seriously ill until just weeks before his death.
He urged democratic governments around the world to work for the release of other political prisoners in China, as well as jailed journalists, before it is too late for them, while he also called for Liu’s widow, Liu Xia, to be freed from house arrest.
If it happens again, he said, it “will be a failure for all democracies and for our own societies.”
Liu Xia was last seen in photographs and a video clip provided by Chinese authorities of her husband’s funeral and sea burial on Saturday.
A Hong Kong-based concern group, the Information Center for Human Rights and Democracy, quoted an unnamed relative of hers as saying Tuesday that she and her brother have been sent to southwestern China’s Yunnan Province on a “traveling tour” and that she would be allowed to return home in Beijing no earlier than Thursday.
Shirin Ebadi, an Iranian lawyer and human rights activist who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2003, proposed at the news conference in Taipei that Taiwan erect a monument to Liu and designate July 13 as the day to commemorate his death.
“It is our duty to remember who died to make a better life for us,” she said.
Wu’er Kaixi, known for his leading role in the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, agreed, saying remembering a person like Liu is “the most humble but important power an individual possesses against tyranny.”
“I call upon the whole world to let each other know that we are determined to remember,” said the Chinese dissident, who serves as a member of the RSF Emeritus Board.
The RSF’s bureau in Taipei will monitor press freedom in China, Hong Kong, Macau, Japan, North Korea, South Korea, Mongolia and Taiwan.
The association said it chose Taiwan due to the self-ruled island’s central geographic location and ease of operating logistics, as well as its status of being the freest place in Asia in the group’s annual World Press Freedom Index ranking.
Praising Taiwan’s strides, Deloire said Monday in a meeting with President Tsai Ing-wen, “We hope this ‘freedom laboratory’ will be an example for the rest of the continent, amid a global decline in media freedom.”
“To this end, Taiwan must resist violations of the independence of its journalists, especially those carried out under Beijing’s influence, and must improve its legislation,” he said.
In his remarks Tuesday, Deloire said RSF decided against establishing its first Asian bureau in Hong Kong due to concerns over limits on freedom of speech there and possible surveillance of its staff.
He said the Chinese government, like that in Russia, “wants to set up a new world media order” and “wants to change the world before we succeed to change China.”