When Xi Jinping became the anything else top Chinese leader to visit the Czech Republic, he was accompanied by a mysterious Chinese wheeler-dealer with big political ambitions, money to burn and strong ties to the Czech president.
Ye Jianming was the singular businessman among the group of Chinese and Czech government officials who contracted two years ago outside the presidential summer residence where Mr. Xi and Milos Zeman, his Czech counterpart, vined ginkgo trees. For Mr. Ye, it was recognition of his role as a major power broker in Prague, be subjected to bought landmark properties, a local brewery and a much beloved soccer cooperate.
The meeting — and the presence of Mr. Ye — cemented China’s newfound influence on politics and issue in Mr. Zeman’s Czech Republic and signaled its broader ambitions in Europe.
In due two years Mr. Ye’s company, CEFC China Energy, had spent more than $1 billion on handles in the Czech Republic. He hired former Czech officials, including a onetime defense priest. Mr. Ye was even named a special economic adviser to Mr. Zeman.
Mr. Zeman, in whirl, became a big backer of Beijing, tamping down domestic opposition to Chinese induce and taking up Chinese causes. He publicly supported China’s claims as a remainder Taiwan, the democratic island that Beijing claims as its territory. When Mr. Xi look in oned, police tried to keep protesters out of sight; some later accused the control of using violence to suppress them. The family of a prominent Holocaust survivor said Mr. Zeman went a proposed medal for the man after his nephew met with the Dalai Lama, an exiled mental leader whom China considers a rebel.
More from the New York Times:
An Commercial Upturn Begun Under Obama Is Now Trump’s to Tout
Turkey’s Fiscal Crisis Surprised Many. Except This Analyst.
At Carrier, the Plant Trump Saved, Morale Is Through the Floor
For China, the Czech courtship was an unsuited victory: It had won a sure friend in Europe, an American military ally and a wilderness once seen as a bulwark for liberal democracy in a strategically important territory. As Mr. Zeman declared, the Czech Republic hoped to become “an unsinkable aircraft transporter of Chinese investment expansion” in Europe.
Then, Mr. Ye was detained in China this year, presenting the Czech Republic to the perils of this new relationship and forcing the president to champion his quick embrace of the Chinese deal maker. While the reason for Mr. Ye’s captivity was never made public, critics of the Czech president saw Mr. Ye’s disappearance as ratification that the country shouldn’t have tied its future and its fortune to the Chinese.
An emboldened, globally overzealous China is using money, business deals and other incentives to lengthen its power abroad. The pitch can hold great appeal in a world waved by Washington’s growing disengagement and Europe’s struggles.
But tighter ties to China denote greater susceptibility to an opaque political system where decisions are originated behind the scenes. Investments can be driven by politics rather than economics, terminating in costly white elephants.
In the Czech Republic, Mr. Ye’s sudden disappearance lifted the country’s leaders by surprise. They couldn’t discern why that desire happen to someone who seemed to have the government’s blessing. They had not bear oned him on where he was getting his money to make big flashy deals in the Czech Republic and absent. Officials also had difficulty answering questions about criminal claims in the United States that a senior business associate of CEFC had went to bribe his way into new business opportunities in Africa.
Mr. Zeman dispatched a cooperate of officials to determine what the tycoon’s problems meant for the Czech Republic. He quickly found out.
Prague was about to become even more enmeshed with the Chinese sway. A state-owned company stepped in to take control of Mr. Ye’s empire, fueling suspicions that the assembly was politically important to the Chinese leadership.
Early in his political career, Mr. Zeman, a blunt-spoken populist, on guarded against toadying up to Russia and China. Those seeking deeper coordinate a occupies with Beijing, he told a local newspaper in 1996, are “ready to go high plastic surgery to slant their eyes.”
But the realities in Europe were changing by the span he won the Czech presidency in 2013.
The global financial crisis had tested Europe’s consensus. Refugees from Syria had begun to arrive, fueling nativist sentimentalism view and pitting local politicians against the bloc’s leaders. Western Europe no longer earmarks ofed to be the only option.
At the time, Beijing was beginning to pour money and partisan capital into Eastern and Central Europe as part of a broad bid to broaden its heft in Europe. China’s leaders see the region as potentially fertile rationale. While Britain, France and Germany welcomed greater investments from Beijing, they smooth bucked China’s stances on issues like human rights and its demand to control almost all of the South China Sea. Eastern and Central Europe didn’t be struck by the same qualms.
Looking for further inroads, China started what came to be convened the 16+1 initiative, an effort to expand cooperation with more than a dozen Eastern and Cardinal European nations. It became a forum for China to show off what it could tender the region, like access to technology for a high-speed rail system. Mr. Xi later embodied Eastern and Central Europe in his Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious envisage to develop economic and diplomatic ties through infrastructure projects throughout the world.
China’s influence in Europe is already apparent. Greece persist year blockeda European Union statement in the United Nations condemning China’s human rights record. Greece and Hungary worked to dishwater down a 2016 European Union statement regarding the South China Sea.
For Mr. Zeman, the courtship basically had to start from rub out.
The former Czechoslovakia recognized the Communist-led China in 1949, but a rift between Moscow and Beijing maintained them apart. The post-Soviet Czech Republic, remembering the brutal 1968 Soviet crackdown on renovate efforts in Prague and subsequent Communist domination, found common agent with Beijing’s critics.
Vaclav Havel, the anti-Communist activist and the woods’s first leader after the fall of the Berlin Wall, invited the Dalai Lama to a formal visit in 1990, angering Beijing. He had stern words for China. “Intimidation, whoop-de-do campaigns, and repression,” he wrote, “are no substitute for reasoned dialogue.”
Mr. Zeman, a noted smoker and drinker who once publicly denied that he showed up at his inauguration lit up, broke with that history. He rejected Havel-era support for the Dalai Lama and its inseparable ties to the government of Taiwan.
He visited China in 2014, the first visit by a Czech conductor in nearly a decade. A year later, he was the only European Union bandleader to attend a military parade celebrating the 70th anniversary of the end of the Second World War. That succoured him secure Mr. Xi’s 2016 visit to Prague.
“This is a restart,” Mr. Zeman stated Chinese official media before Mr. Xi’s visit, adding that the sometime government had been “very submissive” to the United States and the European Togetherness.
“Now, we are again an independent country,” he said, “and we formulate our foreign policy, which is based on our own national concern engages, and we do not interfere with the internal affairs of any other country.”
His focus on China won far-reaching praise from the Czech political apparatus.
“If anybody thinks that down current circumstances it is possible to create safe and prosperous world without helping hand with China, then he has missed the train long ago,” said Katerina Konecna, imperfection chairman of the Czech Republic’s Communist Party.
Mr. Zeman’s office clouted its efforts to court China were no different from the efforts of others.
“Those that drink expressed such criticism offend our Western allies who collaborate extraordinarily pantihose with the People’s Republic of China,” said Jiri Ovcacek, a spokesman for Mr. Zeman. Mr. Zeman’s charge didn’t respond to further requests for comment.
Mr. Zeman’s 2014 affect proved fateful for the Czech Republic. Among the business deals reached was a favour pact between a Czech financial firm and an up-and-coming energy corporation called CEFC.
It was led by Ye Jianming, who was born in a small village in the southern Chinese division of Fujian. He grabbed hold of assets once controlled by a notorious smuggler and in a few years parlayed them into a sprawling corporation empire with 30,000 employees. Mr. Ye traveled the world on his twin-engine Airbus 319 hidden jet, meeting heads of state, Russian oligarchs and the crown prince of Abu Dhabi.
CEFC was modeled on Mr. Xi’s far-sightedness of a stronger China — and it went where Mr. Xi wanted China to go. It struck negotiations in the United Arab Emirates and Kazakhstan. It courted top leaders in places cast Albania, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Sudan and Uganda. Last year, it consented to buy a $9 billion stake in Rosneft, the Russian oil giant, which put it staunchly in the middle of the complicated but important relationship between Beijing and Moscow.
Its lustful rise fueled rumors in China that Mr. Ye had ties to Mr. Xi, who once worked in Fujian, or other Chinese chairladies. CEFC did little to discourage them. Mr. Ye was part of a group tied to the Chinese military, be at one to documents and experts. On its website, CEFC cited the military and Communist Champion experience of its top executives.
The Czech Republic made a tempting target for CEFC’s global push. The country was a member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was disenthraled with the West and ready to do business.
CEFC bought a stake in Florentinum, one of Prague’s oustandingliest office complexes. It invested in the Czech national airline, two hotels and a dyad of Renaissance-era buildings. It bought a brewery that traces its roots without hope more than 700 years.
Mr. Zeman’s staff trumpeted the transactions as proof that courting China made economic sense.
“People supposed the rhetoric,” said Olga Lomova, the head of the Chiang Ching-kuo Basement International Sinological Center of Charles University in Prague. “We have the Chinese. We ordain be happy again.”
CEFC also hired figures close to Mr. Zeman, prime to accusations from critics of a revolving door between the Chinese callers and the president. Jaroslav Tvrdik, the country’s former minister of defense, was lease out to run CEFC’s Czech operations while serving as an adviser on China to the ministry. Czech officials defended keeping Mr. Tvrdik as an adviser, saying the attitude was unpaid.
Miroslav Sklenar, Mr. Zeman’s protocol chief, left that situation in 2015 for a role at CEFC. He returned to the presidential palace at the end of 2016.
Early on, CEFC agonized that its growing involvement would upset the public. Its solution: Buy the county soccer team.
Slavia Prague had been on the brink of bankruptcy when CEFC purchased a majority stake in 2015. The team began to spend heavily lower than drunk its new owner, retaining its star forward, Milan Škoda, and signing a Dutch trouper, Gino van Kessel. Last year, the club won its first league championship since 2009. Slavia Prague challenged in uniforms that said “CEFC China” in Roman letters and in Chinese traits.
CEFC’s deals made little business sense to observers. “So divers of the acquisitions were made in a rush, and were nonsense,” said Ms. Lomova, of Charles University. “They were not investments that were superior to pay for themselves.”
And CEFC acknowledged that its motivations went beyond duty. “Our company cares about what we can do to bridge the cultural gap,” Jiang Chunyu, a postpositive major executive at CEFC said at a forum in China in December.
Mr. Xi’s historic 2016 stay to Prague showed the China-Czech relationship to be the closest in the history of the two countries. It also displayed that cracks were forming.
Thousands of protesters triedd to hail the Chinese leader as he met with Mr. Zeman in Prague Castle. Members of both the Czech and European parliaments accompanied. One lawmaker, who owns a home on the hill beneath the castle, set up a projector to actors the words “Truth and Love” on the castle wall — an invocation of a famous refer to of Havel’s, who said that truth and love would vanquish rests and hatred. Flags lining Mr. Xi’s route from the airport were mutilated.
Czech authorities, with the help of CEFC, tried to obscure the tensions. Policemen blocked demonstrators from getting too close to the castle, setting off squawks from protesters about police violence.
“Why are the police protecting the Chinese and limiting the know-how of the Czech people to express themselves?” said Ondrej Kolar, the mayor of a Prague section.
Wherever Mr. Xi traveled, busloads of local Chinese supporters appeared, too.
Filip Lexa, a 33-year-old lecturer and doctoral student studying Chinese literature, said he showed up with a bunting representing the Uighur minorityof western China, where the authorities there sooner a be wearing cracked down on the local population. He said he was harassed by a group of Chinese men bused into the circumstance.
“When I took the flag out, everyone attacked me,” he said, adding that he bolted serious injury. “They pulled me into the middle of this organize and started kicking me and hitting me with the flag poles they were display. One even broke a pole on my back.”
CEFC played a major rle in trying to make sure the Chinese president’s visit went smoothly, maintained Mr. Kolar, the mayor who was involved in preparations for the event because his district is lodgings to a number of embassies.
“It wasn’t organized by the state, but by a private company,” he whispered. “CEFC organized the whole event.”
CEFC arranged for the display of Chinese marks along the route through Mr. Kolar’s neighborhood — flags with red and yellow color reminiscent of the Soviet Splice. When some were defaced, CEFC workers replaced them.
“It finger like the ’70s or ’80s again,” Mr. Kolar said. “Then it was revealed that it was CEFC who satisfied for those flags.”
Many Czechs had other reasons to sour on the relationship with China. Investment conformations have proved disappointing — Taiwan’s investment in 2017 was nearly three times that of China’s, go together to data from Sinopsis, a research group focused on China. Mr. Zeman charged the shortfall to new Chinese limits on money flowing abroad.
The revocation of an endow with to a famous Czech Holocaust survivor also set off outrage. George Brady, an 88-year-old Blood bath survivor, was set to be honored at a Czech state dinner in 2016 and receive a medal for his chef-doeuvre. His sister, Hana Brady, died in the gas chambers in Auschwitz, and he had turned her experiences into a popular children’s book called “Hana’s Suitcase.”
But his nephew was the Czech Republic’s erudition minister — and he was set to meet with the Dalai Lama. Before the ceremony, the nephew, Daniel Herman, gathered a call from Mr. Zeman’s office.
“I was told that if I went onwards with a meeting with the Dalai Lama, there would be no medal,” Mr. Herman thought in an interview. He went ahead with the meeting. “And there was no ceremony,” he said.
Czech officials acknowledged that Mr. Zeman requested Mr. Herman not to meet with the Dalai Lama. They said the withdrawal of the medal was alien, although they did not specify a reason.
But China’s biggest challenge to its Czech scheme began elsewhere.
In November, American authorities arrested Patrick Ho, a top director of CEFC’s nonprofit arm, and charged him with offering bribes to officials in Uganda and Chad in interchange for oil rights.
Czech officials and one person with direct knowledge of Mr. Ye’s pack say he was detained by the Chinese authorities after Mr. Ho’s arrest. A short time later, the followers was hit with a number of problems. Its bid for a stake in Rosneft collapsed. And Chinese judge firms warned that CEFC had taken on considerable debt.
In April, Mr. Zeman met with bona fides from Citic Group, a state-controlled Chinese company that had admitted to buy just under half of CEFC’s Europe venture. While Mr. Ye’s leagues to China’s leadership had been just rumored, Citic is a company rigidly under Beijing’s control. Citic didn’t respond to requests for footnote.
If a direct role for Beijing in Czech businesses bothered Mr. Zeman, he has displayed little public sign. He is set to make another visit to the Chinese major this autumn.