China insisted Thursday that all Chinese prisoners in Guantanamo Bay should be handed over to Beijing following US President Barack Obama's decision to close the "war on terror" jail.

"These people are members of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement (ETIM) terrorist organisation on a sanctioned list of the UN Security Council," foreign ministry spokeswoman Jiang Yu told reporters.

"They should be handed over to China, which will handle the case by law."

Obama was set to sign an executive order on Thursday calling for the closure of Guantanamo Bay within a year, in a marked reversal of policy from his predecessor George W. Bush.

The prison, which holds about 250 inmates, was opened in early 2002 as a way of holding detainees beyond the reach of US courts.

There are 17 Chinese prisoners there that Beijing says are part of ETIM, a UN-listed terrorist group that wants to create an independent homeland in the northwestern Chinese region of Xinjiang.

Xinjiang is a vast area of mountains and deserts that borders Central Asia, and many of its 8.3 million Uighurs, a Muslim minority speaking a Turkic language, say they have suffered decades of repression under communist rule.

Uighur dissidents and some human rights groups have said China has exaggerated the threat from ETIM and other alleged terrorists in Xinjiang to justify a harsh security crackdown there.

Jiang reiterated China's opposition to other nations taking in Chinese Guantanamo Bay prisoners, after some European governments indicated their willingness to resettle detainees if the US closed the prison.

"China is against any country accepting those people and they should be returned to China as soon as possible," she said.