China–Czech Republic relations or Sino–Czech relations are international relations between China and the Czech Republic. There were official relations by 1919 and formally established relations followed on 6 October 1949 between Czechoslovakia and China. In 1993, the Czech Republic was established and inherited the Czechoslovak treaty. The relations, trade and tourism between the China and the Czech Republic improved rapidly since the 1990s; and in the 2010s, agreements were made for more thorough economic improvements. Recently, relations have deteriorated due to major Czech politicians visiting Taiwan.
History
1919–1939
In 1919, the newly established Republic of Czechoslovakia was recognized by China. At the Paris Peace conference in 1919, Czechoslovakia and China both voted for the Racial Equality Proposal.
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. Writing in French, Lu declared :"je crois qu'elle pourra aussi intéresser les lecteurs de votre pays". Czech scholars tended to be more interested in Chinese culture than the other way around. 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?" Only after a wave of assaults perpetuated by the SA in 1933 against Chinese university students studying in Germany did those Chinese wishing to study abroad began to consider universities outside of Germany. The low importance assigned by the Waichiaopu to relations with Prague was shown by the fact that Chinese minister in Warsaw was also the minister to Prague and rarely left Warsaw to meet Czechoslovak politicians. Following a corruption scandal in 1933 involving the Chinese minister in Warsaw, Chang Hsin-hai, whom it was discovered had accepted bribes to sign fake invoices for arms shipments from Czechoslovakia that actually went to Spanish Morocco instead of China, Liang Lone was appointed Chinese minister in Prague.
The appointment of a minister in Prague improved Czechoslovak-Chinese relations, and in the 1930s China began to purchase industrial equipment and arms to modernize China, especially its armed forces. At the time, Czechoslovakia had the world's 7th largest economy and Czechoslovakia had easily the modern developed and industrialized economy in Eastern Europe. The former Austrian provinces of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia that now comprise the modern Czech republic had been the industrial heartland of the Austrian empire, where the majority of the arms for the Imperial Austrian Army were manufactured, most notably at the Škoda Works. One consequence of this legacy was that Czechoslovakia was only nation in Eastern Europe besides for the Soviet Union that manufactured its own weapons instead of importing them, and Czechoslovakia was the world's 7th largest manufacturer of arms, making Czechoslovakia into an important player in the global arms trade. China, which at the time had virtually no arms industry of its own, was keenly interested in importing arms from Czechoslovakia.