(TibetanReview.net, Jan12’26) – Given the regime-threatening protests that are being staged across Iran these days by a people no longer able to endure the economic hardship caused by their theocratic government’s grossly misplaced priorities, the Communist party of China (CPC)-state can only be expected to be ever more repressive in quickly putting down such incidents taking place under their watch.
As a matter of fact, expressing dissent is sensitive and risky in China, and doing so in the face of it is usually a sign of how desperate people see their situation to be, just like in Iran.
It is in this backdrop that protest incidents, which have been rising across China recently, are swiftly put down, and their media coverage yanked by the authorities, reported news.sky.com Jan 12.
According to data collected and analysed by research group China Dissent Monitor (CDM), which is an arm of US-based NGO Freedom House, there have been over 5,000 cases in 2025, with incidents having dramatically increased, the report said.
This has been confirmed by an exclusive analysis for Sky News which shows that the numbers for the first 11 months of last year were up by 48% on the same period in 2024, the report said.
CDM, which was initially funded by the US government but is now funded privately, gathers most of its data by constantly trawling Chinese social media, and it says there are likely many more cases that it doesn’t see in time or that are never uploaded, the report noted.
“Real-world protests are much higher than what we capture,” Kevin Slaten, the research lead for CDM, has said. “We don’t know exactly how many times higher.”
The reasons behind these protests are varied – from unpaid wages to rural land forcibly taken for construction, from perceived unfairness in the school system to homeowners who poured life savings into properties that were never delivered, the report noted.
But in total 85% of the incidents CDM has charted since June 2022 have reportedly been about economic grievances.
A person surnamed Li who runs an account on X called “Teacher Li is Not Your Teacher” and where he reposts videos of protests in China on Western-based sites that the censors can’t control, has said: “”The reasons [for a rise in protests] are interrelated…. The economic downturn has led to social instability, which has led to the government’s desire to impose more control over society, which then has led to more discontent in the population.”
Protests are often swiftly shut down, local media will rarely report them and evidence will be scrubbed from social media by an army of censors, he has said.
Sky News which tried to cover an incident in an industrial corner of the city of Shenzhen faced a swift, repressive clampdown. “Hands immediately blocked our lenses, men pulled members of our team to the side, our camera was seized and we were forced into cars and driven away,” the report said.
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Overtly political protests are much more unusual, given how extremely sensitive the CPC is to such incidents, which the Chinese citizens fully understand by the brutality of its repressive nature.
In a country that prizes “social stability” above almost all else and where a comprehensive system has been built up over many years to sustain it, any gathering is seen as having the potential to spiral and is thus treated as a threat, the report noted.
“People are careful in what they say publicly, to not link this to the central government in many cases. But that doesn’t mean that that’s the same as trusting the central government,” Slater has said.
For example, in the southwestern city of Jiangyou this summer, what started as a peaceful protest about a school bullying incident spiralled into anger at the authorities as people felt their concerns were not being listened to. Hundreds of people took to the streets, some chanting “huan wo minzhu” [give me back democracy], and the incident culminated in violent clashes with police, the report noted.
Observers have pointed to the fact that many NGOs and advocacy groups in China that used to act as conduits for people’s grievances have been forced to close in recent years, leaving the people with a feeling of having fewer options for recompense.
However, given the fact that millions of Chinese people don’t recognise this because they are happy and prosperous and see no need to protest, a Chinese government official has told Sky News that dissidents are not representative of the mainstream of Chinese society.
Still, it is clear that China would prefer its dissent not to be seen, despite the fact it is increasingly there, the report said.