China Power | Diplomacy | East Asia

Czech-Taiwan Ties Are Cooling in Rhetoric, Not Reality 

Czechia’s new government has changed its tone on Taiwan, but left most of the substance of the relationship intact.

Taiwan’s President Lai Ching-te presents the Order of Propitious Clouds with Special Grand Cordon to Czech Senate President Miloš Vystrčil in Taipei, Taiwan, June 2, 2026.

When Prime Minister Andrej Babiš returned to power in late 2025, many assumed Czechia’s unusually warm relationship with Taiwan would cool with him. Under the previous government, Prague had become one of Taipei’s most enthusiastic partners in Europe. Babiš had criticized that posture as ideological indulgence that harmed Czech business interests in China, and the signals since have seemed to confirm a pullback.

A closer look at what has actually changed, rather than what has been said, suggests a more precise reading: Babiš’s government has cooled the rhetoric while leaving most of the substance in place.

An illustration of this came when Senate President Miloš Vystrčil, a member of the opposition Civic Democrats (ODS), the party that led the previous government, planned a delegation to Taiwan in early June. Babiš declined to provide a government aircraft, saying it was a needless expense, and that he did not want the trip seen as an official endorsement that could damage Prague’s ties with Beijing. It was widely read as the moment Prague’s Taiwan enthusiasm met its new limit.

Yet the trip went ahead. Vystrčil, who had anticipated the refusal, led a delegation of around 40 business and academic figures to Taipei on a commercial flight in early June. By his own account the group was smaller than it might have been, precisely because it lacked state transport, but Vystrčil and the others still made the trip and met Taiwanese officials. The visit coincided with a Taiwanese pledge to establish a new fund, reportedly valued at 50 million euros, to encourage investment in both directions. 

The economic core of the relationship has not merely survived the change of government; based on the available official figures, it is expanding. According to Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan’s drone exports in the first quarter of 2026 exceeded US$100 million to Czechia, making it Taiwan’s single largest drone market. On its own, Czechia’s drone imports from Taiwan surpassed the value of Taiwan’s total global drone exports for all of 2025. Official trade data reported by international agencies put Taiwan’s small-drone exports at more than 181,000 units in the first four months of 2026, close to 20 times the figure for the same period a year earlier, with Czechia and Poland as the leading destinations.

Taiwanese analysts have suggested that a substantial share of these systems is ultimately bound for Ukraine through charitable or government-linked programs. If so, the Czechia-Taiwan drone trade is not an abstract token of political friendship. It is tied to the single issue that most animates Czechia’s current foreign policy debate: support for Ukraine. And it has continued to grow through a change of government that was expected to be skeptical of precisely this kind of engagement.

That doesn’t mean the change of government was without consequence. Marc Cheng, executive director of the European Union Centre in Taiwan, observed that the new government is “not devoted to these bilateral relations as before,” despite the people-to-people foundations remaining and sustaining their own momentum. The tone from........

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