A major labor struggle unfolded in late February and early March 2026 at the Polyak Eynez coal mine in Kınık, a district of İzmir in western Turkey. The action was led by Bağımsız Maden-İş (Bağımsız Maden İşçileri Sendikası, Independent Miners’ Union). The immediate trigger was the December 2025 transfer of a 70 percent stake in the Polyak Eynez coal mine from Fiba Holding, a Turkish company, to Qitaihe Long Coal Mining Sanayi Ticaret Limited Şirketi, an affiliate of Qitaihe Longcoal Mining Co., Ltd. (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a; Rekabet Kurumu 2025).
Before the transfer, about 1,700 of a total of 3,000 miners were dismissed by the Turkish owner. This significant downsizing did not itself trigger resistance, because severance and related payments were reportedly made to the dismissed workers. The conflict that erupted in February 2026 centered instead on the remaining workforce—1,243 workers, to be precise—whose wages, bank promotion payments (lump-sum payments that banks make to workers in exchange for handling payroll accounts), and accumulated rights became uncertain after the transfer. Bağımsız Maden-İş pointed to claims that there were disagreements between the previous and current owners over their respective responsibilities regarding workers’ accrued claims, and stressed that the new Chinese owner failed to provide any credible guarantee on these matters. The union also stated that workplace safety measures had been neglected under the new ownership (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a).
The struggle began with a work stoppage on February 20, continued with a seventeen-kilometer march to Kınık town center on February 25, escalated into the occupation of the mine on March 2 after a written payment commitment was not honored, and ended on March 5 with a union-declared victory securing the claims of 1,243 workers, which Bağımsız Maden-İş put at roughly 1 billion Turkish liras (about US$23 million) (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a, 2026e).
This conflict should be situated within Turkey’s broader political economy. Between the currency shock in 2018 and the presidential and parliamentary elections in May 2023, the economic policy of the Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi) government under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan relied on credit expansion and low interest rates to sustain productive investment and private-sector job creation even as inflation soared and external vulnerabilities deepened. Following Erdoğan’s victory in the elections, economic policy was recalibrated toward orthodoxy, resulting in significant interest-rate hikes by the Central Bank at the expense of productive investment and job creation. This shift, coupled with the lack of meaningful relief from the ongoing cost-of-living crisis, increased pressure on the working class.
The Polyak struggle belongs to a broader pattern of labor conflict within Chinese-invested enterprises in Turkey. As Chinese investment has grown, class conflict has followed. In earlier research with Baran Şahinli and Deniz Tuzcu, I identified thirty-nine labor-unrest incidents across twenty Chinese-invested enterprises between 2010 and 2022. Most were conflicts over wages, unionization, and labor rights; others represented backlashes against Chinese construction and mining companies’ reliance on imported Chinese labor, leading to demands for local hiring (Gürel, Şahinli, and Tuzcu 2025). This trend has intensified since then. A prime example is the successful 114-day strike (October 2025–February 2026) at Smart Solar, a Chinese-owned solar panel factory in the İstanbul-Gebze industrial corridor (Cumhuriyet 2026a).
Agrarian Crisis, Mining Expansion, and the Making of a Local Labor Regime
The Polyak conflict also emerged from a wider regional history in which deagrarianization, mining expansion, and the proletarianization of the peasantry became tightly intertwined. Kınık belongs to the broader Soma Coal Basin, which encompasses Soma and Kırkağaç in Manisa, Kınık in İzmir, and Savaştepe in Balıkesir. Until the 2000s, the material basis of small-scale family farming remained relatively strong in the basin. Local peasants with access to land did not generally work in the mines, as farming income was sufficient for household reproduction. The turning point came with the neoliberal restructuring of tobacco farming. The implementation of tobacco production quotas and the subsequent privatization of Tekel ended the era of guaranteed state purchases, subjecting smallholders to a reproduction squeeze that effectively forced them out of agriculture and toward the mines. This was followed by a gendered reorganization of livelihoods, in which men moved into mining while women remained in agriculture through a shifting combination of family farming and wage labor on capitalist farms or in textile enterprises. The Polyak case must be placed in precisely this setting: a local economy weakened first by the erosion of its agrarian base and then by rising extractive investment, increasingly dependent on mining wages for survival, and therefore acutely vulnerable to layoffs and delayed wage payments (Çelik 2023, 7–9; Çelik 2024, 7–17).
Engaging with Chinese Capital and the State
The Polyak conflict quickly evolved into a struggle over the legitimacy of the transfer itself. In a statement on February 23, Bağımsız Maden-İş referred to public allegations that the mine had been transferred for the symbolic price of 100 TL (approximately US$3), despite the presence of equipment reportedly worth at least €60 million (approximately US$69.5 million). The union used these figures to argue that the transfer was dubious, that the new owner lacked both credibility and sufficient financial guarantees, and that workers’ rights had once again been subordinated to an opaque corporate arrangement (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a).
This is where one of the findings of my recent collaborative work becomes directly relevant. In our research on Chinese enterprises in Turkey (Gürel et al. forthcoming), we extensively searched the Turkish Trade Registry Gazette and found that many firms declare strikingly low registered capital. This is not unique to Chinese companies, nor does registered capital mechanically indicate real investment capacity. However, such figures can become politically consequential when workers use them to challenge the credibility of ownership transfers. At Polyak, Bağımsız Maden-İş did exactly that. Union lawyer Mürsel Ünder publicly argued that there was only a minimal trade-registry footprint behind the Chinese-linked firm and that its declared capital was far too low to make the transfer believable (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026c). Başaran Aksu, the union’s organizing specialist, sharpened this point by arguing that if a company with such a weak public profile could acquire the mine and claim the right to operate it, then the people of Kınık and the coal miners—to whom hundreds of millions of liras were owed—could make the same claim far more credibly (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026d). The union thus turned corporate opacity into an argument about legitimacy, capacity, and social entitlement.
Qitaihe’s website adds another layer to the story. It presents the company as active in mining planning and design, construction, EPC (engineering, procurement, and construction) operations, coal washing, equipment procurement, and international trade, with overseas entities in Turkey and Indonesia. In a statement on its website dated January 2, 2025, the company also lists a “Türkiye POLYAK Coal Mine Vertical Air Shaft Reconstruction Project” (Qitaihe LongCoal Mining Co., Ltd. 2025). In our earlier research, we also found Qitaihe involved in the Hema projects in Bartın, one of the most conflict-ridden Chinese-linked mining complexes in Turkey (Gürel, Şahinli, and Tuzcu 2025, 169). Polyak was therefore not Qitaihe’s first encounter with Turkey’s contentious mining sector. This shows that Chinese capital was entering an already conflict-ridden sector through arrangements that workers experienced as fragile from the beginning.
The struggle’s China dimension gained traction on February 24, 2026, when Bağımsız Maden-İş published a trilingual appeal on X/Twitter. By tagging the Chinese Ambassador to Turkey and the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, the union framed the dispute as a state concern. They explicitly identified Qitaihe Longcoal as an affiliate of the state-owned Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group, calling on the Chinese state to intervene in the conduct of its enterprise (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026b). That characterization cannot be stated as a verified ownership fact on the basis of publicly accessible materials alone. Qitaihe’s website does not identify Heilongjiang Longmay as a shareholder or parent. At the same time, Qitaihe’s corporate materials state that the company was restructured in 2015 and “changed to mixed ownership” in 2019 (Qitaihe LongCoal Mining Co., Ltd. n.d.). That formulation does not prove a current state shareholder. But it does matter politically. Combined with the union’s public characterization, the absence of any public rebuttal I have been able to locate in Chinese, Turkish, or English sources, and the union’s March 5 statement that it would continue to facilitate the agreed process in coordination with the Chinese Embassy (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026e), the question of state ties became highly salient even if not fully verifiable.
In the same February 24 X post, Bağımsız Maden-İş appealed directly to Chinese regulatory norms on overseas conduct. It argued that the company’s behavior violated the “Guidelines for Chinese Enterprises’ Overseas Social Responsibility Compliance” (Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China 2025). To support this claim, the union listed unpaid wages, unpaid retroactive entitlements, the absence of severance guarantees, unsafe working conditions, and the refusal to establish lawful dialogue with workers and their union. It then cited specific provisions on labor-law compliance, occupational health and safety, grievance mechanisms, contractual obligations, and corrective action. The union thereby internationalized the conflict in a skillful way, using Chinese regulatory language to reinforce workers’ demands. The point was that if Chinese capital claimed legitimacy through overseas expansion, it could also be called to account through the norms it officially professed to follow (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026b).
Furthermore, Bağımsız Maden-İş’s March 5 victory statement envisaged a role for Chinese state institutions equivalent to Turkey’s General Directorate of Mining and Petroleum Affairs—the main state authority overseeing mining licenses, technical compliance, and related regulatory matters—in clarifying the mine’s production status. In other words, the dispute developed to the point where a local labor struggle in Kınık involved not only the company, local Turkish authorities, and the former owner, but also the Chinese Embassy and other Chinese state institutions named as relevant to implementation and future production (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026e).
The role of union politics is also central here. Bağımsız Maden-İş was not the legally authorized union at Polyak. Formal bargaining authority remained with Öz Maden-İş, which, in Bağımsız Maden-İş’s account, adopted a pro-corporate stance and failed even to inform workers properly during the layoffs and transfer process (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026a, 2026e). By contrast, Bağımsız Maden-İş organized the work stoppage, the march, the occupation, and the wider solidarity campaign that spread from Kınık to larger cities through demonstrations involving numerous labor unions, socialist organizations, youth organizations, and an intensive social media campaign. The Polyak case thus suggests that a small combative union can alter the balance of forces on the ground.
The Polyak struggle was militant and advanced despite repeated instances of state suppression. The gendarmerie repeatedly intervened against the miners and their union. On February 27, union leaders, including general president Gökay Çakır, were detained and later released (Cumhuriyet 2026b). On March 2, when workers moved to enter and occupy the mine after the promised payment date had passed, the gendarmerie tried to block them with barricades and then used force against them. Başaran Aksu, union lawyer Abdurrahim Demiryürek, and several miners were detained (Çelik 2026). Yet this pressure did not break the action. The miners pushed forward, entered the mine (Reuters 2026), and sustained the occupation until the settlement was won. It was a persistent confrontation that endured repression and forced a resolution in the workers’ favor.
Another politically significant aspect of the Polyak struggle was the union’s open move toward the language of workers’ ownership and management. Before the occupation, Bağımsız Maden-İş declared that, if its demands were not met, 1,243 miners would manage and operate the mine themselves. While Fiba Holding’s payment of all accrued claims ended the struggle and removed workers’ management from the immediate agenda, the union’s March 5 victory statement stressed that the struggle had inspired hope for workers’ self-management across the basin and dedicated the victory to the miners who created the Yeni Çeltek self-management experience of 1975–1980 (Bağımsız Maden-İş 2026e), an episode of heightened class conflict in the history of modern Turkey (Öztürk 2022). In recent labor unrest in Turkey, occupations and militant confrontation are not unknown. Much rarer is such a clear and public movement toward a claim to managerial and productive authority itself. That is one reason Polyak deserves close attention.
Conclusion: Chinese Capital in a Crisis-Ridden Social Terrain
Mainstream discussions of Sino-Turkish relations overwhelmingly privilege diplomacy, trade, infrastructure, and geopolitics. Labor usually remains marginal to the picture. But if Polyak is any indication, that omission is no longer tenable. Chinese capital in Turkey does not enter an empty field. What was at issue in Kınık was not only unpaid wages or an opaque ownership transfer, but the reproduction of an entire social order in which agriculture, mining, proletarianization, and class conflict had become inseparable. When Chinese capital entered that terrain through a contested transfer, labor did not disappear behind geopolitics. At Polyak, it returned in a form that combined unpaid wages, contested ownership, public appeals to Chinese authorities, coercive state pressure on workers, and an unusually explicit demand for self-management. That combination is what makes the case so revealing.
References
Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026a. “POLYAK EYNEZ MADENCİLİK A.Ş. Devri, Yaşanan Hak İhlalleri ve İş Bırakma Eylemlerine İlişkin Bilgi Notu.” February 23. https://bagimsizmaden.org/2026/02/23/polyak-eynez-madencilik-a-s-devri-yasanan-hak-ihlalleri-ve-is-birakma-eylemlerine-iliskin-bilgi-notu/.
Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026b. Post on X. February 24. https://x.com/bagimsizmadenis/status/2026235035259686980.
Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026c. Post on X. March 2. https://x.com/bagimsizmadenis/status/2028454984702955648.
Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026d. Post on X. March 3. https://x.com/bagimsizmadenis/status/2028901378970534051.
Bağımsız Maden-İş. 2026e. “Victory for the Polyak Miners in Türkiye: Miners Fight, Miners Win.” March 5. https://bagimsizmaden.org/2026/03/05/victory-for-the-polyak-miners-in-turkiye-miners-fight-miners-win/.
Cumhuriyet. 2026a. “Smart Solar’da 114 Günlük Grev Kazanımla Sonuçlandı: Yüzde 50 Zam ve 44 İşçi İşe İade Edildi.” February 12. https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/turkiye/smart-solar-da-114-gunluk-grev-kazanimla-sonuclandi-yuzde-50-zam-ve-44-isci-ise-iade-edildi-2478338.
Cumhuriyet. 2026b. “Bağımsız Maden-İş Yöneticileri Gözaltına Alındı.” February 27. https://www.cumhuriyet.com.tr/turkiye/bagimsiz-maden-is-yoneticileri-gozaltina-alindi-2482553.
Çelik, Coşku. 2023. “Extractivism and Labour Control: Reflections of Turkey’s ‘Coal Rush’ in Local Labour Regimes.” Critical Sociology, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 59–76.
Çelik, Coşku. 2024. “The Social Reproduction of Natural Resource Extraction and Gendered Labour Regimes in Rural Turkey.” Journal of Agrarian Change, vol. 24, no. 3, https://doi.org/10.1111/joac.12535.
Çelik, Ebru. 2026. “We Will Tear Down the Bosses’ Barricade with Our Bodies.” BirGün Daily, March 3. https://www.birgun.net/haber/we-will-tear-down-the-bosses-barricade-with-our-bodies-697062.
Gürel, Burak, Baran Şahinli, and Deniz Tuzcu. 2025. “Labor Unrest in Chinese-Invested Enterprises in Turkey: Local Dynamics and Global Implications.” Asian Perspective, vol. 49, no. 1, pp. 157–182.
Gürel, Burak, Kadir Selamet, Baran Şahinli, Alperen Şen, and Deniz Tuzcu. 2026. “The Political Economy of Chinese Investment in Turkey: Recent Trajectory and Structural Constraints.” Asian Perspective, vol. 50, no. 2 (forthcoming).
Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China. 2025. “商务部关于印发《企业境外履行社会责任工作指引》的通知” (Notice of the Ministry of Commerce on Issuing the Guidelines for Chinese Enterprises’ Overseas Social Responsibility Compliance). December 30. https://hzs.mofcom.gov.cn/zcfb/qtzcfg/art/2025/art_b449a9c25d384ad1b03bbba2a1e546c4.html.
Öztürk, Zeynep. 2022. The Social Struggle in the Yeni Çeltek Coal Basin (1975–1980): Sources of Politicisation in Self-Management Practices. M.S. thesis, Ankara: Middle East Technical University.
Qitaihe LongCoal Mining Co., Ltd. n.d. “About Us.” https://www.qitaihelongcoal.com/?a=index&c=Lists&m=home&tid=1&lang=en.
Qitaihe LongCoal Mining Co., Ltd. 2025. “Türkiye POLYAK Coal Mine Vertical Air Shaft Reconstruction Project.” January 2. https://www.qitaihelongcoal.com/?a=index&aid=95&c=View&lang=en&m=home.
Rekabet Kurumu. 2025. “Polyak Eynez Enerji Üretim Madencilik Sanayi ve Ticaret AŞ.” December 25. https://www.rekabet.gov.tr/tr/SonKurulKarari/bbc56f33-0fea-f011-93f4-0050568585c9.
Reuters. 2026. “Turkish Mine Workers Clash with Police during Protest over Wages.” March 2. Video. https://www.reuters.com/video/watch/idRW015202032026RP1/.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Umut Kocagöz, president of the Agricultural Workers’ Union (Tarım İşçileri Sendikası), for helping fact-check the details of the Polyak struggle and for sharing his insights into the regional context.
Burak Gürel is an associate professor of sociology and the director of the Center for Asian Studies at Koç University in İstanbul, Turkey.