Prague, April 6 (CTK) – Ma Keqing, the Chinese ambassador to Prague who achieved a lot as an architect of Chinese expansion in the region, ends in the post after four years in connection with the fresh changes in China’s Communist Party leadership, daily Lidove noviny (LN) wrote on Friday, citing two reliable sources.
Personnel changes are following the election of President Xi Jinping’s adviser Li Zhanshu as the new head of China’s National People Congress. Ma was told that her mandate as ambassador would not be extended, LN writes.
“The Prague post is reportedly to go to another female diplomat who served in Prague already in the past,” a source from the diplomatic circles told LN.
Together with Ma, Prague will probably be left by her husband Wang Qian, who has held the post of an attache, the daily writes.
Ma’s mission in Prague has definitely been effective from Beijing’s point of view, it writes.
Immediately after arriving in Prague in 2014, she started systematically touring Czech regions and also offering cooperation with Chinese universities, securing Chinese grants for several of them, LN writes.
The doors to the Czech Presidential Office have always been open to Ma, it says.
Above all, she assisted in the expansion of the Chinese CEFC investment group, which chose the Czech Republic as its European base. She also helped lobbyists in building Chinese medicine clinics and boosted contracts for Czech aviation business, the daily writes.
Ma has succeeded in stemming Czech politicians’s criticism of the Beijing regime. Most Czech politicians now prefer speaking of China, with its new silk road, as a country of big opportunities, LN writes.
When Daniel Herman, then culture minister, met the Tibetan Dalai Lama in Prague in October 2016, Ma immediately visited President Milos Zeman and later on the same day, the Czech four top constitutional officials (Zeman, the prime minister and the heads of the two houses of parliament) issued a declaration recognising China’s territorial integrity, LN writes.
During Ma’s diplomatic mandate, regular flights were launched to link Prague with Beijing, Shanghai and Chengdu.
She assisted in launching a business with the Chinese traditional medicine clinics by the Delta Capital company of Czech-German tycoon Michael Broda, who hired former Czech PM Petr Necas (2010-13) as a lobbyist and who sold a share in the business to the Chinese last year, LN writes.
The biggest deal boosted by Ma was the expansion of the CEFC, with Czech lobbyist and former defence minister Jaroslav Tvrdik at the head of its European group, it continues.
However, the strength of Ma’s Prague mandate seems to copy the sinking influence of the CEFC in Europe, the daily writes, referring to media reports about the CEFC’s financial troubles and the investigation of CEFC head Ye Jianming, who Zeman’s adviser, over suspected corruption, the paper writes.
When Ma visited Prague Castle last time a month ago, she met Presidential Office director Vratislav Mynar, who asked her about the investigation of Ye, but was given no new information.
