In 1919, official diplomatic relations were established between the Republic of China and Czechoslovakia. On 6 October 1949, the People's Republic of China (PRC) established relations with Czechoslovakia. In 1993, the Czech Republic was established and inherited the Czechoslovak treaty. The relations, trade and tourism between the PRC and the Czech Republic improved rapidly since the 1990s; and in the 2010s, agreements were made for more thorough economic improvements. Relations have deteriorated since 2018 as the Czech Republic has strengthened its ties with Taiwan.

History 1919–1939 In 1919, the newly established Republic of Czechoslovakia was recognized by the Republic of 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.

In the 1930s, China had 17 diplomatic missions in Europe with embassies established in Paris, London, Moscow, Berlin and Rome. By contrast, China maintained legations in Lisbon, Warsaw, Vienna and Prague as Portugal, Poland, Austria and Czechoslovakia, respectively, were considered only secondary powers. The fact that none of those nations where China maintained relations at a legation level had extraterritorial rights led the Chinese to attach some importance to relations with those states as it allowed them to show the rest of the world that extraterritorial rights were not necessary to have a good relationship with China. The Chinese diplomats in Europe in the 1930s formed a closely knit group of friends, all of whom had attended foreign universities to study international law and foreign languages, who met on a regular basis to discuss the problems of Europe and Asia. 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. Additionally, various Chinese notables such as Madame Chen Suk-ying, the wife of Sun Fo, H. H. Kung and Wang Jingwei regularly visited Prague to see the renowned doctor Wilhelm Nonnenbruch, and would stop by the Chinese Legation. 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".

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. The leaders of Czechoslovakia were obsessed with the fear that their country could be destroyed in a matter of days in a "cataclysmic war" while China "...had over the past 100 years surrendered piece after piece of its territorial sovereignty and still continued to exist". The principal aim of Czechoslovak diplomacy was to build a system of alliances which would deter a potential enemy, especially Germany, from invading while the principal aim of Chinese diplomacy was to secure foreign aid to allow China to modernize and end its treatment as a second class power by the Western nations and Japan. Liang wrote the elites in Czechoslovakia and China had very "different senses of time" with the Czechoslovak leaders thinking in terms of years while the Chinese thought in terms of decades. The virulent anti-Asian racism held by Adolf Hitler and the rest of the Nazi leaders were generally not considered a problem by the Chinese diplomats, who knew Germany was the main source of weapons for China and the military mission training the Chinese Army, which led them to ignore Nazi racism as much as possible. 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.

In 1928, China purchased a hydroelectric power plant from Škoda and in 1933 the machinery for a sugar processing plant, likewise from Škoda. As part of the effort to diversify the sources of arms as the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek did not want to become overtly dependent upon Germany (the largest seller of weapons to China until 1938), Chinese officers regularly visited Czechoslovakia on arms buying missions from 1932 onward. In 1932, H. H. Kung, the Chinese Finance Minister, visited Czechoslovakia to inspect the armament factories in Plzeň and Brno. 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. 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.

The great prestige maintained by Edvard Beneš, who was considered one of the most ablest diplomats in Europe, was often noted by the Chinese. Beneš was a great believer in the League of Nations, arguing that all the nations of the world, regardless if they were great powers or small powers should be treated equally, a message that appealed to Chinese diplomats who were struggling to end the "Unequal Treaties" that gave the citizens of the European great powers extraterritorial rights in China. 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. In practice, however, Beneš who saw the principle of collective security under the banner of League as a way of getting the great powers to defend Czechoslovakia, regarded collective security as only applying to Europe, not Asia. Beneš felt that applying the principle of collective security to the defense of China against Japanese aggression would distract the attention of the great powers from Europe, leaving Czechoslovakia open to German aggression. Czechoslovakia's support for China during the Mukden incident was mostly rhetorical as Beneš deplored the Japanese aggression against China without doing anything more. On the other hand, the fact that Germany was the largest source of arms for China together with the fact that a German military mission was training the National Revolutionary Army led the Chinese government to support the German viewpoint on the Sudetenland until June 1938 when the Reich ceased arm sales to China and withdrew the German military mission. After Germany switched from supporting China to supporting Japan in June 1938, Chinese attitudes towards Czechoslovakia became more favorable. Li Ban, a Chinese officer serving with the Wehrmacht transferred over to the Czechoslovak Army in July 1938, becoming the one and only Asian in the entire Czechoslovak Army. Li left the Wehrmacht out of disgust with Germany's support for Japan, and declared that he would fight with Czechoslovakia if the Reich should invade.

The younger Liang wrote about his father's time as minister in Prague: "...I like to think that the six happy years that Liang Lone-and indeed our whole family-spent in Prague between 1933 and 1939 made for a rapprochement between China and Czechoslovakia that was good for both countries. I cannot speak for Czechoslovakia, but I think I can speak of a growing appreciation for the democratic ideas of President Masaryk and President Beneš on the Chinese side. My father respected Beneš, and ten years later, when I was already a student and Beneš had just died, he spoke to me with affection of his meetings with Czechoslovakia's long-time foreign minister and second president". In a book published in German in Prague in 1938 entitled China muss siegen (China must win), the elder Liang wrote about the process of persecution done in the name of Gleichschaltung (coordination) "such as we see being done in certain undemocratic countries". However, Liang fils wrote about the political attitudes of Liang pere: "...I do not believe that my father shared quite the same abhorrence that Thomas Masaryk and Edvard Beneš felt for Nazi Germany. 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".

1939-1949