Why are Turkish and Chinese netizens arguing online? It’s a bit baffling, as almost no one in China really pays attention to Turkey; it is an unfamiliar country with a very low sense of presence.
Why are Turkish nationalists so obsessed with the narrative that "the Great Wall was built to defend against the ancestors of the Turks"? The Great Wall was not built by a single dynasty to fend off a specific ethnicity; it is a frontier defense engineering system spanning over two millennia, having been built and modified multiple times. The Göktürks were indeed once a threat on China's northern border, but they occupy a relatively small portion of the historical timeline. The Great Wall was not born because of the Göktürks, let alone built specifically to defend against the ancestors of modern Turks.
For some Turks who embrace this nationalist historical narrative, the Great Wall might first and foremost mean: ancient China once needed to construct an incredibly massive defensive line to repel "our ancestors." Consequently, the Great Wall morphs from an ancient Chinese historical heritage into an imagined proof of their national military glory. Behind this lies a very typical mechanism of nationalist storytelling: validating one's own historical might by proving that their ancestors once threatened a powerful civilization. In this narrative, the Great Wall serves as an extremely convenient symbol—it is massive, world-famous, and a defensive fortification. Simply interpreting the Great Wall as a structure built to fend off their ancestors generates a simple, intuitive sense of pride. However, from the perspective of military history, building defensive fortifications does not inherently mean one side is weak or fearful of the other. Empires establish border defenses to reduce border-control costs, manage populations and trade, and protect agricultural regions, not because they are entirely incapable of defeating the opposition in field battles.
Was ancient China a major rival in Turkish history? I have no idea, but in Chinese history, there is no such concept as "ancient Turkey." The Göktürks were just one of numerous northern nomadic groups, lacking any overwhelming presence in the history books.
The most hilarious part of this quarrel is this:Turkish nationalists treat the ancient conflicts between the two as a symbol of glory in their national history, while Chinese history views it merely as a brief episode among countless border conflicts over a long span of time. Meanwhile, ordinary Chinese people are completely oblivious to this whole "Turkish ancestors" business, creating the absurdly comedic dynamic of: "You see me as your historic rival, yet I barely know who you are."
Their imagined national epic is just a brief, unnoticed footnote in someone else's history.