Turkish officials in Beijing reportedly refuted remarks Chinese state media attributed to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan at a recent meeting, claiming he had not said people in Xinjiang “live happily,” the South China Morning Post reported Monday.
Xinjiang is home to the majority of China’s ethnic Uighur population, a Turkic community with its own language and culture who largely practice Islam. Under Communist Party chief Xi Jinping, China has launched a systematic campaign to eradicate Uighur culture, forcing as many as 3 million Uighurs – and ethnic Kazakh and Kyrgyz Muslims – into concentration camps where survivors say they are enslaved, indoctrinated, tortured, and murdered.
Turkey, largely due to its cultural ties to the Uighurs, has been one of the loudest voices condemning China’s crackdown in Xinjiang. Many Muslim countries have joined China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a sprawling global infrastructure plan that guarantees developing countries money in the form of predatory loans to spend on Chinese travel technology. Criticizing BRI could cost countries like Malaysia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia significant financial losses.
When Erdogan arrived in Beijing for a state visit this month, it appeared that Turkey would also fall in the category of states too economically dependent on China to criticize human rights abuses against Chinese Muslims. According to the Morning Post report, however, Turkish diplomats claim that Erdogan’s seemingly forgiving words towards China’s Xinjiang policy were put in his mouth by Chinese state media.
“It is a fact that the residents of various ethnic groups in Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region are living happily under China’s development and prosperity,” China’s Xinhua news agency quoted Erdogan as saying. “Turkey does not allow anyone to provoke the relationship between the two countries.”
In return, Xi was quoted in state media as thanking Erdogan for having “reiterated that any anti-China separatist activities are not allowed in Turkey as well as its strong support to China’s anti-terrorist operations.” Chinese authorities insist that the construction of concentration camps, which they refer to as “vocational centers,” was necessary to combat jihadism among the Uighur population. Authorities insist that those corralled in the camps receive free vocational education to learn trades that make them more viable employees in the modern Chinese economy and admit that the prisoners learn Mandarin, but deny that they are forced to abandon the use of their native Uighur tongue.
The Morning Post reported, citing “people with knowledge of the meeting,” that the Turks objected to these alleged quotes in a meeting with Chinese diplomats in Beijing last week.
“Turkish officials said Erdogan’s comments about the troubled region in China’s far west were mistranslated and Beijing refused to correct them,” the newspaper alleged. “The officials said the Turkish president should have been quoted as saying that Turkey ‘hopes the peoples of China’s Xinjiang live happily in peace and prosperity.'”
The slight change in verbiage would remove the implied approval of China’s policies towards Muslims in Xinjiang in saying that they are already “happy” under communism. It would also raise questions as to Xi’s response recorded by Xinhua, thanking Erdogan for supporting China’s “anti-terrorist operations” (the camps), as nothing in the revised statement indicates that Erdogan did so.
The quotes Erdogan provided to non-Chinese government media during his trip also did not signal that he supported the mass internment of Muslims of Turkic extraction. Boarding his flight back from Beijing, Erdogan addressed the issue to reporters and said merely that he believed “we can find a solution to the issue taking into account the sensitivities of both sides.”
The Morning Post‘s sources claimed that, rather than support the camps, Erdogan attempted to keep his conversation with Xi on how Turkey could benefit economically from ties to China, but “the Chinese side tried to concentrate attention on Xinjiang.”
Neither the Chinese government nor the Turkish government have confirmed the meeting or hinted at any disagreement between the two governments. The South China Morning Post is owned by prominent Communist Party member Jack Ma, the wealthiest man in China.
Turkey’s government has repeatedly supported the efforts of China’s Uighurs to live freely and has publicly condemned the concentration camps. While Erdogan himself has not spoken about them in detail – though he called Chinese policies in Xinjiang a “genocide” a decade ago –the Turkish Foreign Ministry issued a statement in February demanding the United Nations “take effective measures in order to bring to an end this human tragedy in Xinjiang.”
“The reintroduction of internment camps in the [21st] century and the policy of systematic assimilation against the Uighur Turks carried out by the authorities of China is a great shame for humanity,” the statement read.
Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu also told the U.N. Human Rights Council (UNHCR) that month that the situation in Xinjiang was a “serious cause for concern.”
“We encourage Chinese authorities and expect that universal human rights, including freedom of religion, are respected and full protection of the cultural identities of the Uighurs and other Muslims is ensured,” he urged.
At the time, China threatened financial retribution in response to the remarks from Ankara.
“There may be disagreements or misunderstandings between friends but we should solve them through dialogue. Criticizing your friend publicly everywhere is not a constructive approach,” Chinese Ambassador to Turkey Deng Li told Reuters, regarding Beijing’s ties to Turkey. “If you choose a non-constructive path, it will negatively affect mutual trust and understanding and will be reflected in commercial and economic relations,” he warned.
Erdogan appears to have since repaired ties to China with his Beijing visit this month. The Turkish government appeared to have little interest in jeopardizing the relationship with more criticism and did not sign a joint letter to China published this month at the United States condemning the Communist Party for establishing concentration camps. It also did not sign a letter supporting China that boasted some of the world’s most repressive regimes – Cuba, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, and Russia, to name a few.
China has repeatedly denied that the Uighur people are Turkic, instead referring to them as strictly “Chinese” despite the little similarity their culture has with the Han ethnic majority of China. It did so most recently in a “white paper” on the alleged lack of human rights abuses in China published Monday.
“Xinjiang has long been an inseparable part of Chinese territory; never has it been the so-called East Turkistan. The Uygur ethnic group came into being through a long process of migration and integration; it is part of the Chinese nation,” the white paper read. “In Xinjiang, different cultures and religions coexist, and ethnic cultures have been fostered and developed in the embrace of the Chinese civilization.”
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