HONG KONG – US President Barack Obama must press China on human rights violations in Tibet and its far-west Xinjiang region during his upcoming Asian tour, Human Rights Watch said Thursday.

"We are seriously disappointed with the administration's efforts to date on human rights in China," Sophie Richardson, Asia advocacy director for the New York-based group, told the Foreign Correspondents' Club in Hong Kong.

"It will be devastating if (Obama) doesn't speak about Tibet and Xinjiang."

A senior US official said this week Obama plans to talk about religious freedom, Tibet and other human rights issues with President Hu Jintao when he makes his first official visit to China next week.

The US president raised human rights issues in other countries and should not "say or do less in Beijing than he has done elsewhere," Richardson said.

Washington has remained largely silent on China's rights record, signalling to Beijing that the US "isn't paying attention" to the issue, Richardson said.

Her comments came less than a week after China said it had executed nine people over deadly ethnic unrest in the country's Xinjiang region.

Fierce clashes between the local Muslim Uighur community, which claims it is oppressed, and China's majority Han ethnic group left 197 people dead and more than 1,600 injured earlier this year, according to an official toll.

Rights groups said that China was guilty of rights violations during the unrest.

Anti-China riots in Tibet during the run-up to the Beijing Olympics last year, and subsequent rights violations, were also pressing issues, Richardson said.

She added that the US had not "stepped up to repair the damage" done by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's comments in February that rights concerns should not hinder cooperation between the two countries on other issues.