New focus on Xinjiang crackdown

China’s crackdown on Muslim minorities in the remote region of Xinjiang will return to the spotlight next week when Beijing hosts the United Nations human rights chief for the first time in nearly two decades.

The highly scrutinised six-day trip by High Commissioner Michelle Bachelet will begin today, with stops in the cities of Urumqi and Kashgar in Xinjiang, as well as Guangzhou in southern China, the UN announced on Friday.

Ms Bachelet will meet “a number of high-level officials”, her office said, adding that she would “also meet with civil society organisations, business representatives, academics, and deliver a lecture to students at Guangzhou University”.

But hopes of a thorough investigation into rights abuses have given way to concern among rights advocates that the ruling Communist Party will use the visit to whitewash its alleged atrocities.

China is accused of incarcerating one million Uyghurs and other minorities in detention camps in the far-western region in a years-long crackdown that the United States and other countries have called a “genocide”.

Beijing has vociferously denied genocide allegations, calling them the “lie of the century” and arguing that its policies have countered extremism and improved livelihoods.

Ms Bachelet will meet virtually with heads of foreign missions today before visiting Xinjiang tomorrow and Wednesday, according to sources.

The visit to China is the first by the UN’s top human rights official since 2005, when Beijing was keen to soften its global image as it prepared to host the 2008 Olympics.

Since 2018, UN officials have been locked in negotiations with the Chinese government to secure “unfettered, meaningful access” to Xinjiang before the trip was announced in March.

Instead, campaigners fear that Ms Bachelet will get a stage-managed tour that sidelines key issues.

With hundreds of thousands in detention and many mosques closed or destroyed, authorities in Xinjiang appear to have pivoted in recent years to focusing on economic development, according to scholars and Uyghurs based outside China.

“Now there’s not much visible evidence of repression,” said Peter Irwin of the Uyghur Human Rights Project.

Campaigners have questioned why Ms Bachelet — a former president of Chile and a torture survivor — has not been more outspoken about Xinjiang.

The United States warned Friday that her “continued silence in the face of indisputable evidence of atrocities in Xinjiang” was “deeply concerning”.