Turkmenistan’s president opened 2023 with a tribute mission to China. As Serdar Berdymukhamedov noted before his departure from Ashgabat, his state visit carried important symbolic value since it fell on the exact 31st anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Turkmenistan and China. After a six-and-a-half-hour flight to Beijing on January 5, Berdymukhamedov was driven in a motorcade to the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse, where North Korean leader Kim Jong-un was put up in 2018. The lodestar of the Sino-Turkmen relationship at present is the joint declaration on the establis…