Dear Mr. President, Mr. Ambassador, ladies and gentlemen, dear friends,

Let me welcome you at the Czech Embassy in Beijing, and thank you for attending today's special event, which we, together with our Slovak and Chinese friends, are going to celebrate.

Today we meet here to commemorate the 55^th anniversary of the establishment of the Sino-Czech-Slovak Friendship Farm, an event which is an expression of our mutual relations and traditional friendship. The former Czechoslovakia has offered, at that time still a very young new China, its experienced professionals, modern agricultural machinery and equipment to help to start building a new model of agricultural production on the Bohai Sea shore. To commemorate this step, the Chinese government decided to give the Farm a symbolic name of friendship between the two countries, which has survived up to this day.

It has been a long time since then, much has changed, but the friendship and strong ties with remote countries in central Europe remained. The Farm and its hardworking people created a new world for themselves and their children, built a modern agricultural sector, new apartments, schools, public buildings…but they did not finish their work with that. They established a new industry, which extended this previously solely agricultural area to an industrial development zone, and they opened the gates to foreign trade. Today the Farm is planning to build a new city for a million of inhabitants and offers to the Czech and Slovak friends many investment opportunities in the development zone.

The Farm became for us, diplomats from the Embassy, ​​but also for other official representatives and businessmen from, nowadays, two separate countries, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a kind of a Chinese home. We meet together there, with open arms and minds, we are seeking new opportunities for cooperation, which would correspond to today's situation and needs. People from the Farm regularly visit our two countries and maintain old contacts as well as create new ones.

Today, we host the friends from the Farm and we would like to assure them that our friendly relationship will continue in the future. We will pass it on our successors in the diplomatic service, we will write and talk about it at our homes, in the heart of Europe. In this way we will maintain the heritage of the past times, when our countries and their traditions and values became allies to achieve a common goal – to create a better future for their peoples.

Allow me, dear Mr. President, to take this opportunity on behalf of the Czech Republic and to wish you all the best to this year's anniversary, good luck and happiness to you and your colleagues, as well as a strong health and dedication to achieve the other tasks that await you on the path to the future.

Thank you for your attention and let´s hope that you will spend a pleasant afternoon with friends from the Czech and Slovak Republic.