Why Turkey Annoys Some Chinese: Pan-Turkism and Xinjiang

On the Chinese internet, “why does Turkey annoy people so much” is a question that keeps coming back. A Zhihu author writing under the name Jiu Xian Dionysus offered a fairly specific answer: the problem is not that Turkey as a country is objectionable, but that Pan-Turkism keeps running into China’s core interests. That framing is worth pulling out and discussing on its own, apart from travel and daily life, because the warmth many people feel while traveling in Turkey and the nationalist rhetoric they see in the news really are two different things.

To understand that gap, start at the beginning of modern Turkey. After the Ottoman Empire broke up, Kemal reorganized the imperial remains — which the great powers might otherwise have kept carving up — into a modern nation-state, pushing secularization, nation-building, military modernization and realist diplomacy. But what Kemal built was no longer “the state of the Ottomans” but “the state of the Turks.” An old empire that had lost most of its territory then faced a question: where does historical depth come from? To the west lay Europe, which a century of effort had failed to make Turkey a real part of. To the south lay the Arab world that had once belonged to the Ottomans, with unhappy historical memories, and integrating the Middle East would mean conflict with nearly every regional power. That left a third direction: east.

How the eastward narrative took shape

From Anatolia through Azerbaijan and Central Asia all the way to China’s Xinjiang, the basic framework of Pan-Turkism reinterprets the Turkic-speaking peoples of Eurasia as one historical community spanning a thousand years. The author points out that this narrative touches three regions at once: the Turkic peoples inside Russia, Central Asia within Russia’s traditional sphere of influence, and China’s Xinjiang. For China, then, it is not a distant nationalist current but an ideology that directly touches territorial, ethnic and security issues. That is why Chinese people experience Turkish nationalism differently from French, German or Arab readers.

A language community is not a political community

The author also criticizes Pan-Turkism’s method: it habitually works backward from a language community to a political community, and then to a national community “since ancient times.” Two thousand years of Eurasian steppe history are far more complicated. Among the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Rouran, Turks, Uyghurs, Khitans, Mongols and the countless Central Asian regimes that followed, there was war, conquest, alliance, migration, language replacement and extensive population mixing. Turanists, however, like to take today’s ethnic map and hand out “identity cards” to the ancients: anyone who spoke a Turkic language or once lived on a certain stretch of steppe gets placed in a lineage running from antiquity to modern Turkey. The author argues this is the same narrative method as explaining the Xiongnu, Xianbei, Rouran and Mongols all as one Mongolian nation continuing to this day.

Historical detail and the complexity of reality

The piece also mentions an often overlooked detail: the Uyghur Khaganate was an important ally of the Tang dynasty and helped put down the An Lushan rebellion, and the Uyghurs’ rise itself took place during the collapse of the Eastern Turkic Khaganate. Such facts show that steppe politics was a tangle of alliance, betrayal and assimilation, hard to sum up with a single ethnic lineage. For travelers, this means some historical accounts heard in Turkey may carry a strong political projection — but that does not mean every Turk holds the same view, and there is still distance between everyday life and official or extreme nationalist rhetoric.

Treating Turkey as a travel destination and treating it as a political subject that needs to be examined are two different things. The first lets you enjoy the bazaars, the coast and the people; the second requires seeing where the Pan-Turkist narrative crosses the line of fact. Understanding that distinction may be more useful than simply asking whether the country is likable.