Xinjiang in focus as U.N. rights chief arrives for China visit

Michelle Bachelet began her six-day visit in the southern city of Guangzhou and will travel to the Xinjiang cities of Kashgar, once a stop on the Silk Road, and Urumqi, the region’s capital.

Allegations of human rights abuses in northwestern China’s Xinjiang region will dominate a visit by the United Nations’ top rights official that began on May 23.

Michelle Bachelet’s trip is the first to China by a U.N. high commissioner for human rights since 2005, and rights groups warn it threatens to whitewash abuses by the ruling Communist Party in Xinjiang.

China locked up an estimated million or more members of Uighur, Kazakh and other Muslim minorities in what critics describe as a campaign to obliterate their distinct cultural identities. China says it has nothing to hide and welcomes all those without political bias to visit Xinjiang and view what it describes as a successful campaign to restore order and ethnic cohesion.

Ms. Bachelet began her six-day visit in the southern city of Guangzhou and will travel to the Xinjiang cities of Kashgar, once a stop on the Silk Road, and Urumqi, the region’s capital. Details have been tightly held and China’s Communist Party-controlled media have not reported on Ms. Bachelet’s visit.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin confirmed Ms. Bachelet's arrival and said she would have “extensive exchanges with all sectors." No journalists will travel with her in China, but Ms. Bachelet will “brief the media on her visit in due course," Mr. Wang said at a daily briefing on May 23.

“I hope that this visit will further promote exchanges and cooperation between the two sides and play an active role in advancing the international human rights cause," Mr. Wang said.

A key question is whether Ms. Bachelet will be allowed to visit the former internment camps that China called vocational training and education centers and meet with people imprisoned over calls for greater religious, political and cultural freedoms, such as Ilham Tohti, an economist and winner of the Sakharov Prize.