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| - The Czech senate speaker said Tuesday he would travel to Taiwan in August with a business delegation to make good on his late predecessor's plan, triggering criticism from China. "I will go to Taiwan. I am convinced it is the correct decision," Milos Vystrcil, head of the upper house of parliament, told reporters. He said he would make the seven-day trip to fulfil the legacy of the late Czech President Vaclav Havel, a human rights fighter and dissident leader of the 1989 Velvet Revolution which toppled communism in the former Czechoslovakia. "If the government's foreign policy does not fulfil this role, if it doesn't support human rights and freedoms, then it's up to the parliament to highlight this foreign policy feature," said Vystrcil, a member of the right-wing opposition Civic Democrats. Taiwan has been ruled separately from China since the end of a civil war in 1949, but under the "One-China" policy, Beijing considers it a part of its territory, with reunification by force an option. The Chinese embassy in Prague warned Tuesday that the trip would undermine future cooperation. "Such a visit would be tantamount to open support for the separatist forces and activities linked to 'Taiwan's independence'," the embassy said in a statement on its website. "Such an act is a remarkable intrusion in China's sovereignty and its territorial integrity," it added, expressing "strong dissatisfaction and disapproval of this act". Vystrcil is following in the footsteps of his predecessor Jaroslav Kubera, who died of a heart attack in January while planning the trip to Taiwan. After Kubera's death, Czech media published a letter stamped by the Chinese embassy in Prague, in which China threatened both Kubera and Czech companies intending to accompany him on the trip. "Czech companies whose representatives visit Taiwan with Speaker Kubera will not be welcomed in China or by the Chinese people," the letter read, adding that Czech firms present in China "will have to pay for the visit". Czech media suggested the letter was commissioned by the head of the office of pro-Chinese, pro-Russian Czech President Milos Zeman, who denied the allegation. Zeman's spokesman Jiri Ovcacek on Tuesday likened Vystrcil's trip to a visit to the self-proclaimed Donetsk republic in eastern Ukraine. Vystrcil also slammed the Czech government for allowing "frightening dependence" on China in medical material supplies during the coronavirus pandemic after officials signed several costly deals with China. Ties with China suffered a blow last October when Prague city hall, run by a mayor from the anti-establishment Pirate Party, pulled out of a sister deal with Beijing over its insistence on the One-China policy. Prague then signed a partnership agreement with Taipei in January, triggering outrage in Beijing. frj/amj/bp
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