Coronavirus Should Not Damage the Trade Between Turkey and China

We want Turkey and China to be closer in terms of trade and tourism

There are 102 days between the first Coronavirus case in China and the first case in Turkey. This difference provided an advantage for China at certain points, and they achieved to take the disease under control. On the other hand, there are some people holding China responsible for the outbreak all over the world, but we will learn everything as time goes.

China announced its Belt&Road initiative in 2013 and Turkey as one of the countries in this initiative is after the questions such as, “what is happening in the world?” and “where are trade wars and commercial interferences going?” with its central position in the Belt&Road initiative. Because China wanted to get more share from the world trade, and maybe reach the peak with this project.

However, the USA has been the leader of the world trade since WW2. And it did not want to let China take its place and it led to trade interventions, conflicts, or wars. In the middle of all these, the coronavirus came out and the pandemic sat at the agenda of the whole world.

China Recovered Mostly

Asian countries and the origin country of the pandemic, China took some early measures and prevented the disease from spreading all over the country. We heard that white collars started going to work after the pandemic process ended to a great extent. Afterwards, blue collars also started working and now the country carries out its production at 70-75% capacity. As you know, there are 160 countries registered to the World Trade Organization. And two of them are China and Turkey. In Turkey, we restarted the trade between us in a limited way. I say limited because this trade does not cover health and certain food products. And there are changes at some points in our trade. Today, some companies in the automotive and mining sectors started exporting to China. The wheels slowly started turning again. At the same time, China made tax deductions in over 800 products as of January 1, 2020. And this would strengthen our economic relations.

Another important thing took place at the end of March. Turkey Wealth Fund and Chinese Sinosure signed a 5-billion-dollar agreement. It was a significant step financially for this period that we are in. We want the two countries to be closer in terms of trade and tourism. As DEİK, we hope that we can help to achieve our goals under the leadership of the chairpersons of our business councils. Because we can only overcome this process by working together.

Asia Pacific Business Councils Coordinating Chairperson Murat Kolbaşı