Chinese President Xi to meet Turkey's Erdogan at regional summit

China's President Xi Jinping will meet his Turkish counterpart Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Friday, on the sidelines of a regional security meeting in Central Asia, state media said.

Beijing's ties with Ankara have been overshadowed by international criticism of China's alleged human rights abuses against the Uyghurs, a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority in the country's northwest Xinjiang region.

China has been accused for years of detaining more than one million Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, and a UN report has stated torture allegations were credible.

"On the morning of September 16, President Xi Jinping will meet with Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Samarkand," Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said, announcing the meeting on the sidelines of a summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) in the city in Uzbekistan.

Turkey is a dialogue partner of the SCO.

Xi also met Russian President Vladimir Putin and Iran's Ebrahim Raisi at the regional security summit, which the Chinese leader is attending on his first trip abroad since the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.