China’s Foreign Ministry announced on Friday that Foreign Minister Hakan Fidan would visit the country on June 3-5. He will be the guest of top diplomat Wang Yi who met Fidan in the capital of Ankara in July 2023, their first meeting in Türkiye after Fidan took office, Turkish media reports.
Türkiye and China enjoy close ties, although the issues relating to the rights of the Uyghur community in China’s Xinjiang overshadowed relations. Still, the two countries pursue closer economic cooperation and more international collaboration in global affairs. They raised the level of relations to strategic cooperation more than a decade ago and signed a key memorandum of understanding in 2015 over Belt and Road and Middle Corridor initiatives.
Wang has made his first visit abroad to Ankara last year and was also received by President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Wang’s visit was the highest level Chinese official to visit Ankara in the past three years. It was also Wang back then who visited Türkiye to mark the anniversary of establishing diplomatic ties. Erdoğan visited Beijing in 2019 on an official visit.
Fidan’s visit comes at a time when China raised its voice about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The Chinese president this week has called for a Middle East peace conference. Beijing has kept a relatively low profile amid the conflict, unlike its major rival the United States, which has fervently endorsed Israel amid brutal massacres of Palestinians. Türkiye, for its part, leads diplomatic efforts to end the conflict and for a two-state solution. Fidan has been busy with a diplomatic blitz in cooperation with counterparts from the Arab League and the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) to that extent.
