Beijing defended itself Friday against criticism at the UN of its human rights record, saying it had made "remarkable progress" by following "a path with Chinese characteristics" on the issue.

The United States and 11 other countries took China to task at the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, demanding it immediately release all detained activists and lawyers.

"We are concerned about China's deteriorating human rights record, notably the arrests and ongoing detention of rights activists, civil society leaders and lawyers," Keith Harper, the US ambassador to the body, said Thursday.

The criticism spurred an unusually fierce response from China's representative at the council, who fired back with blunt critiques of the US's human rights record.

"The US is notorious for prison abuse at Guantanamo prison, its gun violence is rampant, racism is its deep-rooted malaise," said Chinese diplomat Fu Cong on Thursday.

"The United States conducts large-scale extra-territorial eavesdropping, uses drones to attack other countries' innocent civilians, its troops on foreign soil commit rape and murder of local people. It conducts kidnapping overseas and uses black prisons."

Under President Xi Jinping, China's ruling Communist Party has tightened controls over civil society, detaining or interrogating more than 200 human rights lawyers and activists in what analysts have called one of the biggest crackdowns on dissent in years.

China defended itself again on Friday, with foreign ministry spokesman Hong Lei saying that "no country is perfect" and accusing Washington of "seriously interfering with China's domestic affairs and judicial sovereignty".

Beijing protected the rights of its citizens "by combining principles of the universality of human rights with China's realities", Hong said. "We have found a path with Chinese characteristics and made remarkable achievements."

Harper's remarks echoed recent comments from UN human rights chief Zeid Ra'ad Al Hussein, who also called for detained lawyers to be released.

China is currently in the spotlight over the disappearances of five Hong Kong booksellers who reappeared on the mainland, and the use of televised confessions from suspects, among a host of other issues.

Hong Kong's SCMP newspaper website blocked in China
Beijing (AFP) March 11, 2016 - The website of the South China Morning Post, a Hong Kong newspaper being bought by Internet giant Alibaba, has become inaccessible in China during a series of high-level government meetings in Beijing.

Attempts by AFP in China on Friday to open the newspaper's English and Chinese-language websites returned only error messages saying that the pages could not be displayed.

The scmp.com website was blocked starting on March 3, according to the security website GreatFire.org, which monitors online censorship in China.

China's Communist Party oversees a vast censorship system -- dubbed the Great Firewall -- that aggressively blocks sites or snuffs out Internet and TV content and commentary on topics considered sensitive, such as Beijing's human rights record and criticisms of the government.

Popular social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter are inaccessible in the country, as is Youtube.

Several Western news organisations have accused China of blocking access to their websites in the past, including the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg and Reuters.

The SCMP's Chinese-language public account on WeChat, a popular chat app, was also inaccessible.

The paper's account on China's Twitter-like Weibo had also disappeared by Friday.

Alibaba's purchase of Hong Kong's South China Morning Post for $266 million, announced in December, has sparked fears the newspaper will lose its independent voice, in what analysts see as part of a gradual erosion of press freedoms after the semi-autonomous city was returned to Chinese rule in 1997.