Word: bequelin
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...undercutting the official line that all grievances in Tibet are inspired by the Dalai Lama and driven by independence plotters, the group's report offers hope of a freer debate over tensions in China's sensitive border regions, according to Nicholas Bequelin, researcher for the NGO Human Rights Watch. "This is something that we've been waiting for a long time," he says. "Any improvement in Tibet and Xinjiang can only trickle down from more open areas of China." (Read "Dalai Lama to Stay Quiet on Tibet's Future...
...advocates, it has become increasingly clear in recent months that those reforms are still a long ways off. "It used to be the case that whatever the negative developments and systematic smothering of dissent, there were always some signs of hope and potential advances on other fronts," says Nicholas Bequelin, a China researcher with the New York-based Human Rights Watch. "But recently the good news has been very few and far between. There has been a total lack of progress on legal reform, the media, rural reform, labor. These issues were very much carrying forward hope for opening...
...Bequelin and others say the Communist Party's profound fear of the impact of the world economic crisis on China's already fragile social stability has strengthened party hardliners. They argue that the lack of international response to Beijing's suppression of political dissent before and during the Olympic Games - the jailing and intimidation of dissidents like Hu Jia, for example - makes even more stringent repression now the government's best option. Sinologists say a series of sensitive anniversaries that fall this year - including the 20th anniversary of the crushing of demonstrations in Tiananmen Square and the 60th anniversary...
...Jintao's oft quoted catchphrase. Whereas previous leaders like Deng Xiaoping and Jiang Zemin have taken risky steps such as opening the country to economic reform and joining the World Trade Organization, the administration of President Hu and Premier Wen Jiabao seems "paralyzed by fear of the downside," as Bequelin of Human Rights Watch puts it. He says the state's level of control has always oscillated, but with a long period of heavy repression having already past and no prospect of relief in sight, the risk of serious destabilization is growing fast...
Police also questioned Bao about Charter 08. But his association with Zhao Ziyang offers him a degree of protection. "It's because Zhao still has a big following within the Party," says Bequelin. A picture of Zhao, who died in 2005, rests high on a bookshelf in a place of reverence in Bao's home. Zhao was deposed in May 1989, just before the Tiananmen crackdown, for sympathizing with the student demonstrators. Bao was arrested and spent seven years in prison for "revealing state secrets" and "counterrevolutionary propagandizing." Rather than silencing him, Bao's prison term convinced...