Word: bequelin
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...President Hu Jintao, who made the successful staging of the Games the centerpiece of his presidency, a moment of truth looms. He will face mounting pressure to loosen the party's grip on power. Nicholas Bequelin, China researcher for Human Rights Watch in New York City, believes the pre-Olympics tightening of controls is actually contributing to rising social discord. "The pressure is building in the pressure cooker, and there's no current avenue for it to be released. I believe we will see many calls both inside and outside the party to put some sort of reforms...
...that the Olympics are halfway through, says Nicholas Bequelin, China researcher with HRW, any remaining hope that the authorities would relax once the Games were underway has also been dispelled. Bequelin notes that they "wouldn't even allow protests in their own designated protest zones in Beijing - protests that couldn't possibly have hurt anyone." Instead, at least five Chinese citizens applying to protest in the three official zones have been arrested as they've tried to register. Beijing has not commented on the arrests, but the state media has reported that all of the 77 protest applications submitted have...
Social discord is on the rise, says Bequelin, and contributing to that is Beijing's increased tightening of control over the media and reducing access to courts and the petitioning system that allowed people in the provinces to bring their complaints to the capital. Those measures have left no avenue through which victims of China's headlong rush to development, like those who have had land seized, can express their unhappiness. "The pressure is building in the pressure cooker and there's no current avenue for it to be released," he says. "I believe we will see many calls both...
...With the economy also showing signs of weakness, there's little doubt that how Beijing handles issues of dissent and social instability in the post-Games period will have a lasting impact on China's future. And though not everyone shares his sunny outlook, Bequelin remains optimistic about China?s nascent civil society, whose development was temporarily put on ice in the lead up to the Games. "It's a battle in which Chinese are trying to get government off their backs," he says. And what's being fought for by people like Zhou is access to information...
...During the 1980s, Xinjiang militants routinely targeted police stations, military bases and similar targets, but such attacks stopped in the 1990s as Chinese control of the region solidified and was extended down to the village level. Bequelin, who wrote his Ph.D. thesis on the separatist movement in Xinjiang, says the latest attack underscores the "complete failure" of China's heavy-handed policies in both Xinjiang and Tibet. "We have to watch the government's reaction carefully," says Bequelin. "They shouldn't use this as an excuse to become even more oppressive. If people don't have the space to express...