https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/09/16/erdogan-is-turning-turkey-into-a-chinese-client-state/

…For now, strengthening relations between China and Turkey appears to benefit both sides. China has found a highly strategic foothold in Turkey—a NATO member with a large market for energy, infrastructure, defense technology, and telecommunications at the crossroads of Europe, Asia, and Africa. For Turkey and Erdogan, China provides desperately needed resources to fund high-profile megaprojects and maintain the veneer of development despite the crippling economic reality underneath. Just as importantly, Chinese cash helps Erdogan avoid seeking help from Western-dominated institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, which would require him to commit to reforms and other measures that could undermine his unfettered control over the country’s economy.

There is another reason why Turkey and China are in an ever tighter embrace. Both are increasingly shunned by Western countries for their anti-democratic practices at home and expansionism abroad. Neither has many friends in its region. Both share a vision of challenging the hegemony of the United States and an international order based on Western-created institutions. Casualties of the emerging Sino-Turkish strategic partnership are groups like the Uighurs and dissidents in both countries whose protection requires responsive political systems where rights and freedoms are protected through democratic institutions and processes without making them secondary to economic survival and growth.