Taiwan, China foreign ministers make unusual simultaneous visits to Europe

Taipei/Beijing - The Taiwanese and Chinese foreign ministers are both visiting Europe at the same time this week, a rare alignment of schedules in the same location given Beijing's efforts to stop Taipei from having any form of foreign diplomatic engagements.

China views democratically governed Taiwan as its own territory, saying it is a Chinese province with no right to state-to-state ties, a view the government in Taipei strongly rejects and has pushed back against.

Taiwan Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung arrived in Prague on Thursday, attending an event at the Czech National Museum which is hosting an exhibition of imperial Chinese artefacts from Taiwan's world-renowned National Palace Museum.

The Taiwanese museum said in a statement that also attending the opening of the exhibition with Lin was Czech Senate speaker Milos Vystrcil, who visited Taiwan in 2020, stoking Beijing's anger.

The Czech foreign ministry declined to comment.

The Czech Republic, which like most countries only formally recognises Beijing and not Taipei, has grown increasingly close to Taiwan, seeing parallels between the threat Europe faces from Russia and the threat the island faces from China.

Taiwan's foreign ministry said Lin's trip to Europe was to promote the Taiwan Culture in Europe Year - a series of Taiwanese cultural events in the continent - "as a bridge connecting European and Taiwanese values, while fostering exchanges and interactions with European partners".

It did not say which other countries he might visit.

Separately, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi starts a three-nation visit to Europe on Friday. He will be going to Austria, Slovenia and Poland.

Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said the government strongly opposes any official exchanges with Taiwan, referring to Taiwan minister Lin as "merely a local foreign affairs official in China".

China and Taiwan earlier this week engaged in a bitter war of words over the Prague exhibition, where one of the National Palace Museum's crown jewels, the Qing dynasty Jadeite Cabbage, is on display.

Asked about the show, China's Taiwan Affairs Office said Taiwan was trying to exploit Chinese treasures for "cultural independence" and that Taipei's aim was "de-Sinification".

On Thursday, Taiwan's Mainland Affairs Council responded that China was the one responsible for not protecting antiques.

"It wasn't us who engaged in the Cultural Revolution, it was the Chinese communists," spokesperson Liang Wen-chieh said, referring to the 1966-1976 period when Mao Zedong declared class war and the sweeping away of old China.

(Reporting by Ben Blanchard and Ryan Woo; Additional reporting by Joe Cash, and Jason Hovet in Prague; Editing by Muralikumar Anantharaman and Shri Navaratnam)