China is pleased with the AKP’s recent efforts to keep the Uyghur issue low profile compared to before, it still does not see Turkey as a reliable partner.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely that of the author/s and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Heinrich Böll Foundation.
Although there is no geographical proximity between Turkey and China, China has always had a place in Turkish politics due to Turkey’s being home to the largest Uyghur diaspora outside Central Asia. Hence, unlike many other countries that have begun to give new importance to China as it has risen, Turkey has always been a watcher of Chinese politics. Because Turkey has been a safe haven for Uyghur emigrants since the 1950s, bilateral relations between China and Turkey have been constructed upon opportunism and mistrust. Although Turkey-China relations have witnessed ups and downs during previous governments due to the Uyghur issue, President Erdoğan’s description of the 2009 Urumqi riots[1] as a kind of genocide carried the disagreement to an unprecedented level. The Turkish government’s positioning itself as the voice of oppressed Muslims during that time led to the government’s speaking out about China’s human rights violations in the Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region (XUAR) on international platforms such as the UN and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).
During the 2010s, Turkish public attention was also very sensitive towards China’s persecution of Uyghurs. For instance, street protests were organized in more than 20 Turkish cities in 2015 after news of China’s ban on fasting in XUAR was released on social media. However, after 2015, the Turkish government adopted a pro-Beijing policy and abandoned the idea of representing Uyghurs on international platforms. Moreover, nationalist circles that had mobilized Turkish society in relation to the Uyghur case also ceased supporting Uyghur political activism in Turkey. Although China searched for indirect ways to restrict at least Turkey’s verbal rebukes of China’s human rights violations in XUAR, Turkey’s domestic political trajectory, such as its growing estrangement from the West, provided an unexpected opportunity for China to draw Turkey to its line on Uyghur issue.
Turkey’s ties with the EU began to deteriorate after the EU offered Turkey privileged partnership instead of full membership. Moreover, the 2018 lira crisis paved the way for a new environment in which China and Turkey’s interests could overlap. However, the EU and USA’s damaging policies are both a cause and consequence of China’s growing influence in Turkey. The promotion of Western democracy has driven Turkey to seek alternative gravity centres, but the presence of alternative gravity centres such as China and Russia have also facilitated and boosted its new course.
Turkey was the only Muslim-Turkic country in the world with a somewhat democratic system and vibrant society. However, Turkey’s transition to the presidential system has led to the erosion of checks and balances among branches of the government and the new system has entrenched single party rule at home. While the electorate has continued to be a main power base for the government, the horizontal accountability of Turkish democracy has deteriorated within the last years. The new regime has not only suppressed critical media sources but has also created its own advocate media outlets. This new self-ordained system has also been effective in shaping Turkish foreign policy and Turkey’s relations with China. Accordingly, Turkey’s descent into authoritarianism has heralded a new age in bilateral relations.
As direct party-to-party contact, without taking opponents or society into account, is the preferred international interaction style of China, Turkey’s single party rule has attracted China’s attention. New cooperation between China and Turkey has become manifest in many domains, including economics, politics, and security/counterterrorism. Due to the opaqueness of the cooperation between China and Turkey, it is not easy to estimate China’s exact political expectations or demands from Turkey by examining the course of bilateral relations. However, it seems that China’s political expectations from Erdoğan’s Turkey in relation to the Uyghurs are clustered around two main themes. First, silence is desired in the international arena regarding the vast network of detention camps and surveillance mechanisms established by China to tackle so-called extremism among Uyghurs, along with restrictions on the political activism of the Uyghur diaspora in Turkey. Second, any reaction of Turkish society is hoped to be kept to a minimum by the suppression of information about Uyghurs. Accordingly, in the international realm, except for a few insignificant explanations, Turkey has adopted a neutral stance. It has not condemned China for its human rights violations or signed letters calling on China to close detention camps, nor has it supported China’s deradicalisation campaign as other China-friendly countries have done. Ankara’s Uyghur policy can be considered a result of both political and security compromises between China and Turkey. The most striking example of this is the signing of the extradition agreement between Turkey and China in 2017, which aims to restrict cross-border criminal activities. Although it has not been ratified by the Turkish parliament, news leaked from non-official sources about Turkey’s deportation of Uyghur refugees to third countries created a fear of deportation among Uyghurs that they do not have Turkish citizenship or permanent residency. Moreover, Turkey also follows a policy of restricting the activities of the Uyghur diaspora in Turkey. For instance, recently, Turkey did not grant approval to a Uyghur diaspora group that wanted to organize a demonstration in Ankara.
In the domestic realm, Turkey also applies a strict policy of information control on China’s human rights abuses in detention camps. It can even be said that this policy is applied far beyond what China seeks or expects. Pro-government media plays an important role in maintaining the government’s power base by distorting reality and/or suppressing negative information about the ruling party. However, the Uyghur issue and detention camps are completely ignored not only by pro-government media but also by oppositional media, especially in the main news bulletins. While the pro-government media’s policy of ignorance is designed to not incite the Islamist-nationalist electorate of the AKP, the approach in critical media sources is related to the indifference of Turkish oppositional media. Moreover, the AKP’s cooperation with the Nationalist Action Party (MHP), which was the one of the main defenders of the Uyghur cause in 2018, resulted in the MHP withdrawing its support for the Uyghurs in line with the AKP’s non-offense policy towards China.
The Turkish government’s silence on the Uyghurs has also generated two rarely seen events in Turkish politics. After the 2016 coup attempt, for the first time, an Islamist-nationalist government converged with ultra-secularist leftist groups such as Doğu Perinçek’s Aydınlık group on Turkey’s decision to distance itself from the West and lean towards Eurasianism, which led to the marginalisation of the Uyghur issue. A 2019 motion by the Good Party (İYİ Parti) to open a parliamentary inquiry to examine China’s oppressive practices against Uyghur Turks in East Turkestan was the second example of this unfamiliar unification between different political parties. While the Good Party, the Republican People’s Party (CHP), and the pro-Kurdish People’s Democratic Party (HDP) voted in favour of the adoption of the East Turkestan research proposal, the AKP rejected it and the MHP abstained. Emphasizing Erdogan’s 2019 China visit, thought to concern an agreement on a compromise between China and Turkey, an HDP lawmaker accused the AKP government of abandoning the Uyghurs, stating that the AKP and the MHP had “sold out” the Uyghurs for $50 billion. This was the first solid expression of China’s economic assistance to Turkey in the Turkish parliament. While it is obvious that China’s importance for the Turkish government lies in its economic power, for China, besides Turkey’s strategic or geopolitical importance, the rule of the AKP is also highly relevant. The AKP has become the single actor responsible for making domestic and foreign policy by exercising absolute control over all spheres of politics and oppressing any opposition. Hence, China has seen the single-party domination and presidential system in Turkey as an opportunity, given that its behaviour can be easily constrained using economic leverage.
More importantly, besides the far left, which has no strong power base, nearly all opposition parties including the newly founded ones are united against the AKP’s China policy. It is not only the Islamic-conservative nationalists (from where AKP draws its grassroots support and whose reactions the AKP wants to keep to a minimum by suppressing information) who are very sensitive about Uyghurs as a Muslim-Turkic minority, but so too are secular-nationalists (the Good Party and CHP grassroots supporters). This sensitivity leads the main opposition parties to criticize the AKP’s growing ties with China at the expense of abandoning the Uyghurs. Besides the main opposition parties, the Future Party (Gelecek Partisi) and the Democracy and Progress Party (DEVA) have also criticised the authoritarian and anti-Western turn of the AKP government. While the Future Party focuses on the moral shortcomings of the AKP’s Uyghur policy, the DEVA Party mostly emphasizes the reliability of Western-oriented economic institutions compared to Chinese-backed ones.
As a conclusion, while China is pleased with the AKP’s recent efforts to keep the Uyghur issue low profile compared to before, it still does not see Turkey as a reliable partner for two possible reasons. The first reason is that the opposition parties’ discontent with AKP’s pro-Beijing policy regarding the Uyghurs poses an obstacle for China to build permanent trust with Turkey because of the possibility that the government might change through elections. The second is that the AKP’s own constantly changing foreign policy makes China worried that the developing ties between the two countries are not irreversible.
[1] This was a peaceful protest by Uyghurs in Urumqi against the Chinese government's inaction after the death of two Uyghur workers at a toy factory in Guangdong, southern China, on July 5, 2009. However, it developed into an ethnic riot after police violence against protesters.