[5] On 10 September 1919, Lu Zhengxiang, a member of the Chinese delegation attending the Paris peace conference, wrote a letter to Milan Hodža, suggesting the play La voile du Bonheur, set in ancient China and written by the Sinophile French politician Georges Clemenceau be translated into Czech.

[6] Writing in French, Lu declared :"je crois qu'elle pourra aussi intéresser les lecteurs de votre pays".

[6] By contrast, Chinese scholars tended to be more interested in German culture with one scholar Yu Ta-wei saying of universities in the Weimar Republic: "there were scientists of the calibre of Albert Einstein, Max Plank and Ulrich von Willamowitz-Möllendorf teaching at German universities-what other country could boast intellectual resources of that calibre?

[6] By contrast, China maintained legations in Lisbon, Warsaw, Vienna and Prague as Portugal, Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, respectively, were considered only secondary powers.

[9] Liang often left Prague to go to Berlin, Paris, London and Geneva (where the headquarters of the League of Nations was located) to confer with his fellow Chinese diplomats.

[9] The American historian Liang Hsi-Huey, the son of the diplomat Liang Lone who served as the Chinese minister in Prague, wrote that Wang, one of the most charismatic men in China and the leader of the left-wing of the Kuomintang until he became a Japanese collaborator in 1938, was "...so powerful an orator that after a patriotic speech he gave in our house over dinner, even our Czech servants in the kitchen felt moved, though they had not understood one word".

[9] Liang wrote the differences between Czechoslovakia, a small, economically advanced, highly centralized state in Central Europe with its "disciplined democracy" vs. China, a large, populous and economically backward country whose "people were held together by traditions of loyalty to family and clan rather than through legal obligations to the state" led to very different approaches to international relations.

[10] By contrast, the völkische concept of Slavs as untermensch ("subhumans") and Germans as Herrnvolk ("master race") led the Czechoslovak diplomats to see Nazi Germany as an existential and immediate threat.

[4] In an attempt to reduce the dependence on Germany as a source of weapons, Liang encouraged Chinese officers to visit Czechoslovakia to buy arms there.

[6] The younger Liang remembered when growing up in Prague that his father would take him on walks through Stromovka park talking about the geopolitical implications of changes in power in Eurasia.

[10] Beneš's message that all of the nations of the world should band together under the League to resist aggression also had appeal to Chinese diplomats after Japan seized Manchuria in 1931.

Like so many Kuomintang politicians of his generation, Liang was still a Confucian at heart, a believer in China's ancient culture, always more inclined to compromise with a Chinese warlord than to become involved with a foreign government.

Beneš by contrast, gave high priority to good relations with neighboring countries, hoping that peace would give the minorities in his small republic the time and confidence to join together in one national community".

[20] In Sestra moje Čina, Průšek portrayed the Chinese as a people wanting to embrace modernity, but not willing to give up their ancient heritage, which many Czechs saw as analogous to their own situation.

[1] Czechoslovakia was one of the first nations to recognize the new People's Republic and became the third largest trade partner of China in the 1950s, being exceeded only by the Soviet Union and East Germany.

[18] In September–October 1959, the First Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist Party, Antonín Novotný, paid a lengthy visit to China to take part in the celebrations of the 10th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic.

[28] The Red Guard were very xenophobic and were inclined to violent harassment of any foreigner in China, and moreover did not respect diplomatic immunity, which was most dramatically illustrated by the sack and burning of the British embassy in Beijing in August 1967.

On 27 July 1967, a formal note against the student ban was issued, which declared Beijing's fury at "the Czech revisionist group" having "publicly attacked Mao Zedong, the red sun in the hearts of the revolutionary people of the world".

[30] On 23 August 1968, the Premier and Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai gave a speech at the Romanian Embassy in Beijing, accusing the Soviet Union of "Fascist politics, great power chauvinism, national egoism, and social-imperialism.

[31] After the Soviet invasion, the principle criticism made of Dubček by the Chinese media was that he had "capitulated" instead of waging a guerrilla war as Mao wanted him to do.

As a result, Chinese propaganda tended to focus on the abstract right of peoples to develop socialism as they saw fit for their own nations instead of the particular policies pursued by Dubček.

[27] By the early 1970s, it became common to speak of a "Prague School" of Sinology as Průšek and his students became regarded as the leading experts on Chinese literature.

[1] Sino-Czech relations were strained under the presidency of Václav Havel who was highly supportive of Chinese dissidents and was a friend of the Dalai Lama.

[27] The bilateral relationship sunk to a low in 1995 as the Czech Republic allowed Lien Chan and other Taiwanese government officials to have a state visit in their country.

Xi expressed he will strive new restart in bilateral relations and Zeman addressed topics on improving business and tourism between the two countries.

[45] In 2018 relations were damaged when the Czech cyber-security watchdog warned of the risks associated with purchasing telecom equipment from Chinese companies such as Huawei and ZTE.

[46] In January 2020 the Chinese ambassador sent a letter to the Czech President protesting the impending trip to Taiwan of Jaroslav Kubera, Speaker of the Senate, as a violation of the one China policy.

In response, China's Foreign Ministry spokesman called it a "despicable act" and a Chinese diplomat threatened that Vystrčil would "pay a heavy price".

[55][56] In 2021, Czech Minister of Foreign Affairs Jan Lipavský was targeted in a Chinese cyberespionage campaign by the Ministry of State Security's APT31 group.