Documentary on Czech Senate president's Taiwan visit makes debut

Prague, Oct. 27 (CNA) A high-profile visit to Taiwan in 2020 by Miloš Vystrčil, president of the Czech Republic Senate, is now the subject of a documentary, which premiered in the Central European country on Monday.

The documentary, titled "Jsem Tchajwanec" (I am Taiwanese), highlights Vystrčil's strong pushback against pressure from China and his own government when he was about to embark on the visit Aug. 30 to Sept. 4, 2020.

The film "evokes memories of a journey that remains deeply meaningful," Vystrčil told CNA at the premiere at the annual Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival.

Vystrčil said he was pleased to see that the Taiwan-Czech partnership remained enduring, and he expressed his continued support for the Taiwanese people, saying, "I am rooting for you."

At a post-screening panel discussion, he said that the 1989 Velvet Revolution and the subsequent fall of communism in Czechoslovakia were a powerful reminder that "freedom is hard-won and must be cherished."

"Once we have gained freedom, we must never again give it up by abandoning what is right, out of fear or threat," Vystrčil said, adding that his decision to visit Taiwan in 2020 was guided by that conviction.

In an interview with CNA in 2024, Vystrčil said he had been warned by his country's Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Chinese diplomats there not to proceed with his plans to visit Taiwan, after he took office as president of the Czech Republic Senate in February 2020.

Vystrčil, however, went ahead with the visit, becoming the first head of parliament from a non-allied country to address Taiwan's Legislature. At the end of his speech in the Legislative Yuan, he declared "I am Taiwanese," in Mandarin.

His statement was in the spirit of United States President John F. Kennedy's famous declaration in German, "I am a Berliner," which he made during a speech in West Berlin in 1963.

Kennedy was expressing solidarity with the people of West Berlin, who were living in a democratic enclave surrounded by communist East Germany during the Cold War.