Former United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Michelle Bachelet met with Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi and Vice President Han Zheng on Wednesday, touring the country amid her campaign to become the next U.N. Secretary General.
Bachelet, a radical leftist, served as president of Chile before completing her term and taking over the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). She served two terms as president in the country, from 2006 to 2010 and, later, from 2014 to 2018. Her time leading the OHCHR spanned from 2018, shortly after the end of her time as president, through 2022, when she chose not to run for a second term amid global disgust and calls for her resignation for her poor handling of the Chinese genocide of Uyghurs and other Turkic people in the country.
Bachelet notably visited China in 2022 shortly before stepping down and, far from condemning the ongoing genocide, praised China’s human rights record and claimed that the concentration camps the Chinese Communist Party had been caught using to imprison as many as 3 million people were no longer functional.
Bachelet is one of five official candidates running to replace Antonio Guterres as the secretary-general of the United Nations. The other candidates are former General Assembly leader María Fernanda Espinosa, former Costa Rican Vice President Rebeca Grynspan, former Senegalese President Macky Sall, and the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Grossi. Bachelet initially enjoyed the endorsement of her country under leftist former President Gabriel Boric, but Chile withdrew its support after the inauguration of conservative current President José Antonio Kast.
Campaigning for the position is often less overt than a traditional political role, involving private meetings with the most powerful actors at the United Nations. Bachelet appears to have traveled to Beijing seeking support from China, though Chinese state media reports did not overtly describe her visit as a formal campaign stop.
Chinese government television networks published images of Bachelet receiving a warm welcome from Wang, the nation’s top diplomat.
Hellbound and Down 