On December 9, Premier Wen Jiabao of the State Council met respectively with Speaker of the Senate Premysl Sobotka and Speaker of the House of Representatives Lubomir Zaoralek of the Czech Republic in Prague.

Wen said that Czech is one of the first counties that established diplomatic ties with New China. Over the past 56 years, bilateral relations have always developing continuously despite some twists and turns. In particular in the past two years, bilateral political relations have been obviously improved and strengthened and the cooperation in various areas has shown sound development momentum. During this visit, both sides reached broad consensus on developing bilateral relations and signed a range of cooperation agreements. China would like to work with Czech to seriously implement the agreements reached between both sides. To develop bilateral relations needs support from the two legislatures and it is hoped that they will strengthen exchanges and play a positive role in expanding and deepening bilateral friendly cooperation and building up understanding between both peoples.

Sobotka said that in the past two years, the Czech top leaders all have visited China and there are also quite a number of ministerial delegations that have visited China. Premier Wen's current visit has also brought a lot of good news to the development of bilateral relations. The Czech Senate supports the consensus and agreements between both sides and would also like to increase exchanges with the National People's Congress of China to have a better understanding of China's development and culture in a bid to push for their all-round cooperation.

Zaoralek noted that the development of bilateral relations enjoys broad prospect and to conduct and deepen cooperation with China is very important to Czech, which is the consensus among all Czech parties. Czech hopes that both countries will strengthen economic and trade cooperation and support two-way investment, and looks forward to further exchanges between both sides in the areas of culture, education and tourism.

Zaoralek emphasized that the Czech House of Representatives and all parties adhere to the one-China policy.