ANKARA — Turkish Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan’s visit to China marked an important turning point in Turkey-China ties amid a display of joint desire for closer relations —disagreements notwithstanding — but some of the rhetoric during the trip raised eyebrows in the West.
Fidan ended his three-day official visit to China on Wednesday in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in northwest China after holding talks with Chinese officials in Beijing, including his counterpart, Wang Yi, as well as Vice President Han Zheng on Monday and Tuesday.
Wearing a blue tie the same shade as the blue-white East Turkestan Uyghur flag, Fidan met with local officials and walked down the streets of the region’s capital, Urumqi, and Kashgar.
His outfit choice on Wednesday seemed like an effort on Fidan’s part to send a symbolic message to the Uyghur community in Turkey — one of the largest and most vocal Uyghur diasporas in the world — and to the broader international public that Ankara’s ties with Beijing wouldn’t come at the expense of China’s largest Muslim minority.
