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in: Metamorphosis of Turkish Foreign Policy in the 21st Century: Opportunities and Challenges, Nergiz Özkural Köroğlu,Hamoon Khelghat Doost, Editor, Rowman & Littlefield, Oxford, Maryland, pp.85-104, 2023
The China-Turkey relations officially started on August 4, 1971. Since then, Turkey’s relations with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have teetered between disappointment and a complex mix of mutual agreement. The relations started on a positive note from the 1970s to the 1980s and then deteriorated sharply in the 1990s. Between 1991 and 2000, no Chinese diplomats visited Turkey, even at the ministerial level (Çolakoğlu 2012, 55). However, the frosty relations between Turkey and China started to thaw in 2002, when the AK Party came to power. Their partnership worsened again in 2009, following the disagreement between the PRC and the Turkey government over the treatment of the Uyghurs in China. During this period, Beijing and Ankara used offensive expressions to criticize each other’s foreign policy, thereby damaging their fragile relations while trying to gain common ground. The two countries, however, succeeded in settling their differences in 2010, after Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Chinese prime minister Wen Jiabao signed a lucrative bilateral trade agreement in Ankara (Dünya Bülteni 2010). The China-Turkey relations later began to blossom again, but the 2019 Abdurrehim Heyit incident reversed the diplomatic gains made by the Turkish and the Chinese governments. These historical events indicate the relations between Ankara and Beijing have never been stable. While the trade deficit between Ankara and Beijing has been a flashpoint for disputes, the Uyghur issue has remained the most difficult challenge threatening Sino-Turkish relations. A significant transformation has ensued in the nature of …