Boarding pass to Prague: What a private airline’s route map reveals about ties between Czechia and Taiwan

When Taiwan’s STARLUX Airlines begins flying to Europe on August 1, 2026, its first European destination will not be London, Paris or Frankfurt, but Prague. At first glance, choosing a smaller capital over Europe’s traditional aviation gateways looks like a curious commercial bet. Viewed against a decade of warming relations between Czechia and Taiwan, however, it appears to be something more: a market decision that also serves as a diplomatic signal, made not by a state-owned flag carrier but by a privately owned airline.

Key takeaways:

On February 4, 2026, STARLUX Airlines announced that its first European route would connect Taipei and Prague, beginning on August 1, 2026. The service will initially operate three times a week, increasing to four weekly flights from October 2026. Prague Airport estimates that the route could carry more than 95,000 passengers annually.

What makes the announcement notable is the choice of destination. The intuitive first European stop would have been London, Paris or Frankfurt, where feeder traffic and onward connections are strongest. STARLUX bypassed all three.

The airline’s official rationale is nevertheless commercial. When announcing the route, STARLUX chief executive Glenn Chai highlighted two main sources of demand: Prague’s long-standing popularity among Taiwanese travelers and the growing semiconductor links between the two countries.

Prague also sits near the geographical center of Europe. Executives traveling to Czechia’s fast-growing semiconductor and automotive clusters would otherwise need to connect through Frankfurt, Vienna or Dubai. A direct overnight flight arriving before 8 a.m. local time would allow passengers to clear Schengen immigration and reach meetings in Prague, Brno or Dresden before lunch.

Yet commercial logic rarely exists independently of politics. In this case, the two are closely intertwined.

Aviation as a tool of foreign policy

The idea that airlines and air routes serve purposes beyond generating ticket revenue is not new. The concept of aviation diplomacy—the use of civil aviation as an instrument of foreign policy and soft power—rests on a tripartite framework: aviation as a tool of foreign policy, aviation as a means of promoting a state’s international image, and aviation actors, including airlines and related institutions, operating as diplomatic agents in their own right.

Opening or maintaining an air link can deepen relations between countries, project a national identity abroad and generate the sustained human contact on which trust depends.

The textbook practitioners are state-backed carriers. Turkish Airlines is perhaps the most frequently cited example. It has been analyzed as an instrument of soft power that complements Ankara’s liberal visa regime and broader regional vision, extending Türkiye’s reach through trade facilitation and people-to-people contact across the Middle East.

The airline’s role, however, extends beyond promoting the country’s image. According to one study of its expansion across Africa, Turkish Airlines acts primarily as a facilitator and connectivity agent: a behind-the-scenes actor whose growing route network links markets that previously lacked direct connections. In doing so, it magnifies the effectiveness of Türkiye’s other soft-power instruments, from trade missions and scholarships to tourism.

More recently, Qatar Airways has been examined through the same lens in the South Caucasus. There, the airline functions simultaneously as an instrument of foreign policy, an engine of nation branding and, through business diplomacy, an independent actor shaping commercial and humanitarian ties.

In each case, however, the carrier is an arm of the state and the diplomatic intent is deliberate. STARLUX does not fit that model. That is precisely what makes it interesting.

When the flag carrier is not a flag carrier

STARLUX is not Taiwan’s flag carrier. That designation belongs formally to China Airlines, while EVA Air also performs many of the commercial functions associated with a national carrier.

STARLUX is instead a privately owned boutique airline founded in 2018 by Chang Kuo-wei, an aviator, businessman and former EVA Air chairman who launched the company following a public succession dispute within the Evergreen Group dynasty.

Operating since January 2020, STARLUX has built its brand around premium service rather than national representation. Its route decisions answer to investors, passenger demand and load factors, not to a foreign ministry.

This is the conceptual twist. Most analyses of aviation diplomacy assume that a government directs its own carrier. Yet that assumption sits uneasily alongside the broader literature on economic and business diplomacy, which has long recognized that companies, business associations and economic elites can shape and facilitate foreign policy alongside states.

International-relations scholarship increasingly treats multinational companies as diplomatic actors in their own right. The aviation-diplomacy framework itself also reserves a category for aviation actors operating autonomously.

Czechia has previously seen this mechanism work in the opposite direction. During the 2010s, the financial group PPF and its subsidiary Home Credit, which depended on consumer-lending licenses in China, lobbied for closer Czech–Chinese relations and covertly financed pro-Beijing messaging in the Czech media. It was a case of economic elites attempting to steer a country’s foreign-policy debate.

For Taiwan, whose formal diplomatic space is restricted by other countries’ One China policies, reliance on commercial actors is even more pronounced. Semiconductor companies anchor its “chip diplomacy”, while trade offices often serve as substitutes for embassies. A private airline extending this pattern is therefore less an anomaly than a characteristically Taiwanese approach.

The Prague route illustrates this quieter mechanism. A private airline assesses the political and economic environment, identifies a market made viable by closer bilateral relations and acts on that opportunity. Diplomacy is not commanded from above; it emerges from conditions created by years of engagement between the two sides.

Within the tripartite framework, STARLUX still performs two diplomatic functions, albeit in private hands.

First, it projects a national image. STARLUX presents itself as a showcase for Taiwanese premium-service culture, and its Airbus A350 at Václav Havel Airport will become one of the most regular and visible manifestations of a Taiwanese brand that most Czechs are likely to encounter.

Second, it serves as a facilitator and connectivity agent similar to those identified in the Turkish Airlines case. The carrier negotiated the route directly with Prague Airport throughout 2025, opened a local office, hired Czech ground staff and designed its schedule around business travel generated by semiconductor, academic and tourism links.

The initiative, however, came from the market rather than the ministry. A privately chosen route therefore reflects the state of bilateral relations and is arguably a more credible signal than one orchestrated by a government, precisely because no government ordered it.

A decade of engagement built the market

That STARLUX found a viable market in Prague at all reflects a relationship that was deliberately developed over more than a decade.

Relations between Czechia and Taiwan date back to the 1990s, and Taiwan opened a representative office in Prague as early as 1991. The major turning point came with Senate Speaker Miloš Vystrčil’s visit to Taiwan in 2020, which ushered in a period of frequent senior-level exchanges and expanded cooperation in technology, education and culture.

In 2023, the speaker of the Czech Chamber of Deputies led a 150-member delegation to Taipei, then the largest delegation sent by any European country. President Petr Pavel also became the first elected European head of state to speak by telephone with Taiwan’s president.

The economic foundations of the relationship are equally significant. Taiwanese information and communications technology manufacturers, including Foxconn, Pegatron and Inventec, have made Taiwan one of Czechia’s largest Asian investors. State-facilitated projects exceeded €800 million and generated more than 24,000 jobs between 1995 and 2022.

Semiconductors have since become the relationship’s central pillar. Taiwan funds three chip-research centers in Czechia, has opened its first overseas Trade and Investment Service Center in Prague and channels venture capital through a dedicated fund for Central and Eastern Europe.

Crucially for an airline, people’s movement has followed. Around 172,000 Taiwanese tourists visited Czechia in 2024, while Prague opened its labor market to Taiwanese citizens without requiring work permits in March 2025.

Prague was, in other words, already an established gateway for Taiwan before STARLUX arrived. Since 2023, Taiwan’s flag carrier, China Airlines, has operated a twice-weekly Taipei–Prague service.

In this case, a state-linked carrier opened the corridor, following the textbook model of aviation diplomacy. STARLUX’s contribution is to double down on it as a private operator, committing premium wide-body capacity to a market created through political engagement and already validated by a flag carrier.

The aviation link did not generate the rapprochement. It monetizes and entrenches it, adding everyday connectivity, including business travel, tourism and family visits, to the existing institutional framework.

Beijing, for its part, measures the same relationship from the opposite direction. As of late 2025, Czechia and Lithuania—the two EU member states most closely engaged with Taipei—remained the only EU countries excluded from China’s expanded visa-free entry scheme. Chinese analysts explicitly linked the omission to their relations with Taiwan.

A route that outlasts politics

The timing is where the story becomes ironic. STARLUX announced the Prague route on February 4, 2026, barely eight weeks after a government markedly less enthusiastic about Taiwan had taken office. Andrej Babiš was sworn in as prime minister in December 2025, following his ANO party’s victory in the October elections. His cabinet quickly signaled a more “pragmatic” approach towards Beijing, arguing that the previous government’s values-based policy had delivered few tangible benefits.

In one pointed episode, Babiš refused to provide a government aircraft for Senate Speaker Vystrčil’s return visit to Taipei in May 2026. He warned that close relations with Taiwan could damage economic ties with China. Vystrčil went anyway, on a direct commercial flight from Prague to Taipei.

The decision to open the STARLUX route predated the new government. Prague Airport confirmed in August 2025 that it was negotiating with the airline, which was already advertising for ground staff in Prague. This was several months before the October election.

The timing of the announcement was therefore coincidental rather than a gesture aimed at the new administration. Yet that is precisely what makes it revealing.

A commercially grounded air link, initiated under one government, arrived intact under another with a markedly different approach to Beijing. At the same moment that the Czech executive was attempting to lower the political temperature of relations with Taiwan, a Taiwanese airline was establishing a permanent fixture: three flights a week between the two capitals.

For most Czechs, the most visible symbol of that relationship may soon be painted on the tail of an A350 parked at Václav Havel Airport. The government can decline to provide an aircraft for a senator’s visit. It cannot ground a commercially viable one.

The underlying relationship now rests on an economic foundation that does not change with the government of the day.

This is where the private-carrier dimension becomes analytically important. An air route directed by the state would be vulnerable to precisely this kind of political shift: a new government cooling official rhetoric towards Taipei, withholding symbolic support or discouraging ministerial contact.

A commercially driven route is largely insulated from such decisions. As CEIAS analysis has found, much of the relationship between Czechia and Taiwan has already been institutionalized through university partnerships, research centers and commercial channels. These ties are likely to survive beyond any single electoral cycle, even if political engagement at the highest level becomes less visible.

STARLUX’s route belongs to this more durable layer. No minister can cancel it, and no summit is required to sustain it—only passengers.

Two further factors suggest that the route is more compatible with the new government than it might initially appear.

The first is the prime minister’s own political temperament. Babiš is a highly transactional actor. Where engagement with Taiwan produces tangible economic gains, he has every incentive to claim credit rather than disown it.

Nor do the gains accrue solely to the Taiwanese carrier. Václav Havel Airport, which collects landing and passenger charges from the route, is wholly owned by the Czech state through the Ministry of Finance. The airport expects the service to generate more than 95,000 passengers annually and presents it as a driver of inbound tourism. STARLUX is also employing staff locally, while Czech exporters gain a direct connection to one of the country’s largest Asian investors.

The second factor is public opinion. Czech attitudes towards Taiwan are among the most favorable in Central Europe. In a CEIAS survey conducted in February and March 2025, 40% of Czechs viewed Taiwan favorably. Alongside Poland, this was the highest share in the Visegrád Four, while Czech attitudes towards Taiwan were considerably more positive than attitudes towards China.

Czechs are also the least receptive in the region to Beijing’s position on Taiwan. Only 16% agree that Taiwan is an inseparable part of the People’s Republic of China, the lowest share in the Visegrád Four. Meanwhile, 49% reject Beijing’s claim that Czech engagement with Taiwan is merely directed by the United States. Czechia was also the only Visegrád country in which support for providing direct economic assistance to Taiwan in the event of a Chinese attack exceeded opposition.

Domestically, a direct flight to Taipei therefore appears more like an asset than a liability—precisely the kind of soft-power benefit that aviation diplomacy is supposed to produce. That durability is the deeper lesson. Lithuania’s high-profile decision in 2021 to allow the opening of a Taiwanese Representative Office produced disappointing economic returns and triggered a costly confrontation with Beijing. The Czech approach, by contrast, has gradually accumulated substance: semiconductor cooperation, integrated supply chains, investment funds and now another direct air connection.

A new airline route is modest compared with a semiconductor fabrication plant or a trade agreement. Yet for a field that has devoted much of its attention to flag carriers and foreign ministries, STARLUX offers an important reminder: some of the most revealing acts of aviation diplomacy may be those that nobody in government ordered at all.