What Are the Chinese Doing in Turkey?

MARDIN, Turkey, July 30, 2008 — -- Deep in the heart of southeastern Turkey, this ancient town sits atop a hillside overlooking the plains of the Mesopotamian Valley. Residents of its terraced, honey-colored houses enjoy a fine view of villages and wheat fields that stretch all the way to the Syrian border.

The area is still largely hidden from outside visitors. Tourism is just beginning to pick up. And locals still react with curiosity to a foreign face. But for the last three years, a group of workers from China has called this town their home. Turkish employees manufacturing door locks at the Mar-Faal factory are no longer surprised to be working alongside Chinese co-workers on the assembly line.

The Mar-Faal factory, which manufactures door locks, is the first Chinese-Turkish partnership in a region that desperately needs economic uplift.

Southeast Turkey continues to emerge from more than two decades of fighting between Kurdish separatists and the Turkish government. Ordinary citizens are now mostly shielded from skirmishes in remote villages and along the Iraqi border, but daily life is still a challenge.

Compared to Istanbul and other cities in Western Turkey, where unemployment is at 10 percent, some areas of the Southeast approach 60 percent unemployment.

Mar-Faal means "Mardin Working," exactly what its shareholders -- one Turkish, two Chinese -- hoped to achieve when they established the factory in 2005.

Though it only employs 90 people, it's one of about 100 factories within the Mardin Industrial Zone, a special region devoted to manufacturing that is separated from the fields of farmers on the floor of the Mesopotamian Valley. These factories employ 3,500 people and offer an alternative to the traditional livelihood of agriculture.

The factory's Turkish investor, Ismail Kaya, has done business with his Chinese counterparts, Rukang Kong and Xiaotao Wang, for years. Looking only at the economics of it, might have been more lucrative to set up Mar-Faal in China, where wages and production costs are far lower and workers are technically skilled. Kaya acknowledges this but hopes that with their investment they can contribute to his hometown's economic growth, reduce unemployment and make a profit at the same time.