The ABC will push ahead with a broadcast on Tuesday night of a sensitive Foreign Correspondent report about the Uighur community in north-west China despite a barrage of high-level objections from Chinese authorities.

When China correspondent Stephen McDonell and cameraman Wayne McAllister visited the Sunni Muslim community in the Xinjiang province to report on violence in the area they were subjected to an extreme level of surveillance and interference.

Before the assignment was over the Chinese had also complained to the ABC’s managing director, Mark Scott, according to Foreign Correspondent executive producer Steve Taylor.

“The amount of surveillance was staggering,” Taylor said. “In my experience it’s not happened before.”

The ABC’s director of communications, Michael Millett, said the Chinese embassy sent a delegation of senior officials to talk to him two weeks ago and made it clear they were not happy with the report.

“They expressed their views about the program,” Millett told Guardian Australia. “I made it clear that the obligation the ABC had was to ensure the story was told properly and that the Chinese authorities would have the opportunity to express their views in the program.”

The ABC has had no further communication with the embassy. McDonell has returned to his base in Beijing.

The treatment of the Muslim community in Xinjiang is a sensitive one for president Xi Jinping’s government, which is making reporting by foreign crews increasingly difficult.

McDonell wrote on the ABC website on Tuesday of the restrictions they faced in preparing the report. “We set out to cross China’s vast western province of Xinjiang knowing that journalists have been blocked from reaching many areas in this increasingly troubled region,” he wrote.

“We wanted to throw some light on the dispute – to speak to people who live in Xinjiang in an attempt to find out what might be causing this bloodshed.

“Chinese officials do not want reporters to talk to anybody in this traditionally Sunni Muslim area unless they are in control of the process.

“The vast majority of our journey to the west was like this: roadblocks, grinning minders, uniformed police, plain-clothed police, passport checks, more minders, more police, more roadblocks and questions.”