The New York Times - July 28, 2015
BEIJING — For many Chinese, the images coming out of Turkey this month have been ferocious and frightening.
Online video clips and photographs from Istanbul have shown Turkish and ethnic Uighur protesters burning a Chinese flag outside China’s consulate; angry men racing threateningly toward Korean tourists, apparently thinking they were Chinese; and a mostly Uighur mob smashing windows at the Thai Consulate after Thailand sent more than 100 Uighurs back to China against their wishes.
Chinese
might wonder whether this is the same Turkey that has been attracting
their country’s tourists in greater numbers — or, for that matter, the
one that agreed to buy a missile defense system from a Chinese company, or that paid Chinese state-owned enterprises to build a 300-mile high-speed rail line between its two largest cities.
Turkey,
heir to the Ottoman Empire, has long seen itself as a protector of
Turkic-speaking people across the arc of Central Asia — and that
includes the mostly Muslim Uighurs in China’s western region of
Xinjiang, where ethnic tensions and outbursts of violence between
Uighurs and ethnic Han, the dominant group in China, have been rising
because of what Uighurs say is official repression, though Chinese
officials blame terrorist ideology.
