Rough ride for vice-president during Turkish visit

ON THE last stop of a three-nation tour, Chinese vice-president Xi Jinping held talks with Turkish president Abdullah Gul in Ankara in which he praised Turkey’s regional conflict-solving role.

Mr Xi is tipped to replace Hu Jintao as Chinese leader later this year and has been on a tour of the US and Ireland that is being closely watched to see what kind of leadership he will provide in China.

He is getting a rougher ride in Turkey than in Ireland or the US, and relations between Turkey and China have been tense over a range of issues. There were protests outside his Ankara hotel by scores of Turkic-speaking Uighurs from China’s northwestern Xinjiang province.

The protesters burned a Chinese flag and a poster of Mr Xi before police dispersed them. China came down hard after Uighur riots in Urumqi in 2009 and Turkish prime minister Tayyip Erdogan then described the events as “genocide”.

Turkey’s government has called for more action in the face of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on dissent, but China, along with Russia, has vetoed two UN Security Council resolutions aimed at ending the conflict.

Turkey has been growing strongly in recent years and was second only to China in terms of growth among the major economies last year. It presents itself as an honest broker in the Middle East, a stable Muslim democracy which can help with resolving conflicts there, such as the Iranian nuclear dispute and Middle East conflicts. China likes to adopt a similar role in Asia in conflicts like the North Korean missile crisis.

"A member of the G20 with a growing economy and an important country in the Middle East, Turkey has for a long time tried to bring stability and development to the region and played an active role in trying to solve 'hot' issues," Mr Xi told Turkey's Sabahnewspaper.

Tensions between Turkey and China have not affected trade and last night the Turkish Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China signed a currency swap agreement worth 10 billion yuan (€1.2 billion). This is part of the Chinese expansion of currency-swap agreements to promote international use of the yuan. – (Additional reporting Reuters)