China In Eurasia

Michelle Bachelet, the UN high commissioner for human rights, has begun a six-day trip to China amid warnings from rights groups and some Western governments that her visit could whitewash Beijing’s human rights abuses in China’s northwestern Xinjiang region.

The tour starts in the southern city of Guangzhou and will include visits to the Xinjiang cities of Kashgar and Urumqi, the regional capital. While the trip is set to focus on China’s human rights record and include issues such as Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong and its policies in Tibet and Inner Mongolia, the Chinese Communist Party’s internment-camp system and sweeping dragnet against its Muslim population in Xinjiang will dominate the agenda.

The arrival of Bachelet marks the first formal visit to China by a UN high commissioner for human rights since 2005 and comes after years of discussions with Beijing to arrange it. Few details are known about the visit and what Bachelet will do and hopes to achieve in the visit, which has prompted protest and backlash that China could look to use the trip to blunt outside scrutiny and criticism of its human rights record.

Such concerns were raised by the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC) -- an international cross-party group of legislators -- which in a May 20 statement signed by more than 40 lawmakers from 18 countries accused Beijing of organizing a “Potemkin-style tour” that could damage the credibility of Bachelet’s office.

China has locked up more than 1 million Uyghurs, Kazakhs, Kyrgyz, and other Muslim minorities in a series of detention centers in Xinjiang, a sprawling region that borders Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Beijing is accused of grave rights abuses there, including a vast system designed to eliminate those groups’ distinct cultural identities.

SEE ALSO:

China In Eurasia Briefing: Is The World Giving Beijing A Pass Over Xinjiang? 

“It defies credibility that the Chinese government will allow the high commissioner to see anything they don’t want her to see, or allow human rights defenders, victims, and their families to speak to her safely, unsupervised, and without fear of reprisal,” Sophie Richardson, China director at Human Rights Watch, said in a statement.

“Bachelet’s legacy as high commissioner will be measured by her willingness to hold a powerful state accountable for crimes against humanity committed on her watch,” the statement added.

Mounting Concerns

The overriding concern for rights groups, Uyghur activists, and Western officials is that Bachelet, the UN’s top rights official who previously served as Chilean president, will be denied the type of unimpeded access necessary for her office to properly probe the allegations and mounting evidence about Chinese government abuses in Xinjiang and beyond.

The UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) has been negotiating with Beijing since 2018 for “unfettered, meaningful access” to Xinjiang. A five-person advance group from Bachelet’s team arrived in China on April 25 to prepare for the visit that her office said will include meeting with a wide range of civil society representatives.

But China’s sensitivity to criticism, its record of reprisals against activists, and its pervasive surveillance capabilities have left many doubting that such criteria can be met.

“We're deeply concerned about the upcoming visit,” U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price said in a May 20 press briefing, adding that the United States had “no expectation that the [Chinese government] will grant the necessary access required to conduct a complete, unmanipulated assessment of the human rights environment in Xinjiang.”

In anticipation of the visit, Radio Free Asia reported that officials in Xinjiang were warning Uyghurs not to speak with foreigners and that police in Kashgar were being sent to “political study sessions” to prepare for the UN trip.

On May 26, the first day of her trip, Bachelet conducted virtual meetings with the heads of around 70 diplomatic missions in China and according to Bloomberg, the UN official aimed to lower expectations about her visit on the call, with several diplomats also expressing “profound concerns” about attempts by Beijing to manipulate the trip.

Chinese officials have repeatedly stated on multiple occasions that Bachelet’s visit should not be turned into a “so-called investigation” and have said that they would only welcome a “friendly visit.”

The OHCHR is also set to release a report that it has been working on for more than three years that is based on interviews with camp survivors, consultations with leading scholars, and mounting open-source evidence, such as satellite images and leaked Chinese government documents.

SEE ALSO:

'Utterly Shameful': Uyghurs' Frustration Grows Over Lack Of International Action Against China

Eager to see the report’s findings, hundreds of rights groups around the world have for months urged Bachelet to release the document, but it remains unpublished and there are worries the current trip could be used to mask those findings.

“It’s time for the UN to officially recognize the brave public testimony of survivors, thousands of pages of leaked Chinese government documents, meticulous peer-reviewed research, and hundreds of damning satellite images of concentration camps,” Omer Kanat, executive director of the Uyghur Human Rights Project, wrote in an article for The Diplomat. “The trip will be nothing more than a propaganda exercise.”

Beijing’s Global Campaign

China has dismissed the allegations and accounts of its actions in Xinjiang as politically motivated lies, saying that its so-called “reeducation camps” in Xinjiang have been necessary to curb extremism in a region that it considers a hotbed of ethnic and religious tensions.

In the face of growing international scrutiny about its policies -- the United States and several Western parliaments have declared that Beijing’s actions amount to genocide and crimes against humanity -- Beijing has looked to use its rising political and economic influence to deflect criticism and gain support from some governments.

Beijing has hosted tours of Xinjiang with diplomats and officials from countries with China-friendly policies, such as Sudan and Tajikistan, where they have then praised Chinese policies in state and local media.

This influence has also extended to international organizations like the UN, where Beijing has pushed and persuaded many developing countries to support or abstain from voting on measures censoring China, leaving only a core group of largely Western nations willing to challenge Chinese policies.

When Ukraine joined more than 40 countries at the UN Human Rights Council in calling for “unfettered access” to Xinjiang in June 2021, RFE/RL and the Associated Press reported that Beijing threatened to limit trade and withhold access to COVID-19 vaccines to force Kyiv to remove its name from the statement.

SEE ALSO:

China Used Vaccines, Trade To Get Ukraine To Drop Support For Xinjiang Scrutiny

China’s policies in Xinjiang have also deeply impacted its neighbors, especially in Central Asia.

Kazakhstan, for example, became an unexpected flashpoint of activism following the expansions of Beijing's camp system in 2017 and 2018 due to family connections between Kazakhs and Xinjiang’s ethnic Kazakh minority, with several former detainees publishing testimonies after fleeing China for the Central Asian country.

Meanwhile, Tajikistan is the subject of a filing by Uyghur organizations to the International Criminal Court (ICC) alleging that the Central Asian government has allowed Chinese officials to operate on its territory in order to deport Uyghurs back to China to try and coerce them into becoming informants.

PODGORICA -- Eight years after the contract was first signed, the initial section of a controversial highway project in Montenegro paid for by a massive $1 billion Chinese loan is nearing completion -- but it still faces lingering questions about its future.

Once hailed by China as a landmark deal within the Belt and Road Initiative -- its globe-spanning infrastructure project -- the highway has since become a cautionary tale that fused together the perils of poor-quality Chinese construction and cursory lending practices with endemic local corruption concerns in the Balkan country.

Montenegro initially borrowed nearly $1 billion from the Export-Import Bank of China in 2014 to fund the first portion of a 163-kilometer highway to link the port city of Bar with neighboring Serbia under the promise of bolstering economic activity in the Balkan country, but Podgorica was instead saddled with debts to China that totaled more than one-third of the government's annual budget.

SEE ALSO:

No Clear Option For Montenegro As It Tries To Repay $1 Billion Highway Debt To China

That long chapter looks set to close, with Montenegrin Prime Minister Dritan Abazovic announcing in May that the first 41-kilometer section of the highway would open this summer.

Ervin Ibrahimovic, Montenegro's minister of capital investments, said during remarks broadcast on state television on May 16 that it could be unveiled in July, although he did not specify what still needed to be completed.

But the story of the controversial highway is far from over, with the future of the remaining 122 kilometers of the originally planned road still unbuilt. At the moment, the initial stretch of road fades out into the middle of a large, forested area and no funds are currently available to continue building the remaining portion.

That has led to growing scrutiny and speculation from local activists and international donors about Beijing's objectives in Montenegro and the Balkans, as well as the motives of the previous government that first gave the green light to the highway.

SEE ALSO:

New Study Says China Using Investments To Buy Political Influence In Central, Eastern Europe

"Any further delay in the opening of the highway is a direct loss for the state and citizens," Dejan Milovac from the watchdog organization The Network for Affirmation of the Nongovernmental Sector (MANS), told RFE/RL.

The original deadline for completion of the highway was November 2019, which was since been pushed back multiple times by the China Road and Bridge Corporation (CRBC), the state company undertaking the construction, which cited the COVID-19 pandemic as the source of the delays.

MANS estimated that the multiple postponements the project has experienced have led to lost revenue from the would-be toll road, with Milovac saying that four successive governments being unaware of when the highway will be completed points to "how frivolously the state approached the project."

Montenegro's Long Road

Despite failing several feasibility studies, the project was inked by then-Prime Minister Milo Djukanovic's government, who took out the massive Chinese loan to fund the highway and enveloped it in a cloud of secrecy.

In addition to the feasibility studies, questions of the profitability and necessity of the highway have followed it since its inception. Djukanovic's government also received construction offers from multiple foreign companies, including the U.S. engineering and construction giant Bechtel, that proposed a more modest and less costly project that ultimately lost out to the CRBC.

The 2014 loan agreement with the Export-Import Bank of China has been made public, but nearly all other documents relating to the Montenegrin highway have been classified as secret by Podgorica.

Amid delays and mounting debt, the engineering project found itself at the heart of a heated debate on Chinese influence in Europe when Podgorica raised concerns that it would be unable to meet its payments to the Export-Import Bank, a state lender, in 2021.

SEE ALSO:

Montenegro Says Deal Reached To Temper Blow Of Massive China Loan

The small Balkan country of just 620,000 people eventually struck a deal with one French and two U.S. banks to restructure the $1 billion Chinese loan and has since made its first debt payment.

The highway, which according to one study could be the world's most expensive road at an estimated $23.8 million per kilometer, has also faced issues over its quality, with former Prime Minister Zdravko Krivokapic visiting the project in December 2021 and criticizing what he said was poor construction.

Krivokapic was ousted in a no-confidence vote in late February and replaced in April by Abazovic, who has been a longtime critic of the highway and first sounded the alarm about debt concerns over the loan during a March 2021 trip to Brussels.

Abazovic's government has signaled a tougher line than its predecessors in pushing back against CRBC and construction delays. Miroslav Masic, director-general for state roads at Montenegro's Capital Investments Ministry, told RFE/RL that apart from an initial extension to November 2020 due to the pandemic, that the government believes that CRBC's reasons for delays are unfounded. "Everything after that [November 2020] deadline is [CRBC]'s responsibility," he said.

CRBC did not respond to RFE/RL's requests for comment about the delays.

Damage Control

Masic says that the government has already begun a procedure to recuperate costs from CRBC due to the multiple delays in the form of penalties. "Certainly, by the end of the project, these penalties can be issued and an overview of costs incurred due to delays can be made," he said.

Milovac from MANS says the current government is right to claim compensation from the Chinese construction firm, but adds that CRBC is not solely responsible for the controversy and problems associated with the troubled highway project.

Only after the complete publication of all the documents and contracts related to the highway, he says, will it be clear who holds responsibility. "On several occasions, we had delays that were approved by previous ministries without the public being fully aware of the exact reasons for that," Milovac said. "As soon as it was approved, we can assume that the blame was also on [the Montenegrin] side and not only on the Chinese side."

Written by Reid Standish based on reporting by Predrag Tomovic of RFE/RL's Balkan Service in Podgorica