When we look at history, two nations have expelled Turks from their lands. The first one is China. It expelled Turks from their homeland Central Asia due to the drought. In recent years, China has piled the Uyghur Turks remaining in our past homeland into camps and pursues a policy of sinifying them with torture.
Russia, on the other hand, expelled the Ottoman Empire from the Balkans, which it had called home for 500 years. In the Balkans, the Russians took the peoples of the region to their side and rolled over the Ottoman Empire in the First and Second Balkan Wars.
Years have passed. China and Russia have moved to the state capitalism model. China and Russia are trying to become imperialist countries in their own right in foreign trade and foreign policy. Russia is trying to do this by using its oil and natural gas, China by using its competitive advantage in foreign trade.
In this article we will explain how China is invading Turkey through exports.
China became a member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2005. As a result, it has used all the opportunities of free trade to attack almost all countries. For example, while the US had a foreign trade deficit of USD 164 billion with China in 2004, the deficit reached USD 382 billion in 2022 despite all the measures taken and the threats of the US administrations. In the first nine months of 2023, the deficit reached USD 210 billion.
The education system is of great importance for China to establish this superiority. In addition, there is incredible labor exploitation in China. The Chinese government is supposedly communist, but its working conditions are worse than in the UK during the industrialization process. I remember in 2021, when there was a succession of worker suicides, the Chinese government banned such news. Because the workers of Alibaba, China’s giant shopping site, were depressed and committed suicide because they were working between 09.00-21.000 6 days a week. Alibaba’s boss at the time, multi-billionaire Jack Ma, epitomized the relentless hard work mentality. He was known for forcing his people to follow the “996” work schedule, especially in the early days of building Alibaba and his tech empire. (Despite his best efforts, Ma was exiled from China and now works as a lecturer at a university in Japan. (State capitalism makes the oligarch rich and leaves the oligarch in his pants in a day)
These suicides have become so common that they have taken on special names. The Foxconn suicides, for example, were a wave of suicides linked to low pay and brutal working conditions at the Foxconn City industrial park in Shenzhen, China.
Turkey does not buy natural gas or oil from China. Despite this, the foreign trade deficit of USD 38 billion in 2022 reached USD 35.4 billion in the first 10 months of 2023. How did this happen? To answer this, let’s ask what goods we import from China. The answer is simple, we import everything we can find. The main reason for this is the relatively low prices of Chinese goods compared to goods produced in Turkey. For the Turkish consumer, this is enough. Because their income is low, they cannot afford a better quality domestic product.
As a result of this Chinese invasion through exports, especially SMEs are forced to close down. While Turkey is losing employment, Chinese unemployed are finding jobs in this way.
If Turkey wants to stop China’s new invasion attempt, it must re-establish its industrial policies and change its perspective on SMEs. Otherwise, this will end badly.