Aim higher, reach further.

Why China’s Street Protests Do Not a Revolution Make

By Russell Leigh Moses

A Weibo screenshot showing photos of protests in Nanjing, China, after officials announced changes to the college entrance quotas in Chinese provinces.

The standard narrative about China is that common people are seeking change and it’s the government that’s standing in their way.

Chinese people protest, Chinese authorities back down, and as demonstrations grow, so does the possibility that the Chinese Communist Party will be confronted with more protests than it can cope with, and it will be compelled to reform quickly or lose power.

However, the local reality on the ground is more complicated, as events in Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province, showed this past weekend.

Beijing announced in recent days that the way the results of China’s annual national examination for college admission were tabulated would change. Jiangsu, one of the country’s more educated and affluent provinces and home to many leading universities, would have to give up 38,000 openings heretofore allocated to the province’s students to fill.

The current examination system affords students from urban areas a significant advantage in how the examination scores are calculated and slots at universities are distributed. Many officials have been arguing for years that the existing system discriminates against less prosperous provinces in China because those regions have been focusing on short-term employment and industry at the expense of education.

While Jiangsu wasn’t the only province made to sacrifice, officials here have been especially unenthusiastic about reforms to the student selection process. The current system makes their region more attractive to educated residents to buy property or remain here after they graduate, they say.

Jiangsu officials lost the argument. And their constituents weren’t happy.

The announcement of changes stunned many parents and students in Jiangsu (as well as teachers and tutors here), all of whom--like their counterparts in other regions--spend enormous energy every year preparing for what is essentially the only route for Chinese youth to be admitted into national colleges and universities. Some parents began protesting at local schools in Nanjing almost immediately. Within hours, China’s social media also erupted in anger at the changes, as did local populations in Nanjing and some other cities in Jiangsu the following day when hundreds took to the streets and demonstrated outside government offices.

Videos posted online show that the vast majority of the protests were loud but peaceful, in contrast to a number of previous episodes elsewhere in China. Within a short period of time of the demonstrators assembling, provincial-level officials appeared before the crowd in Nanjing and promised to hear complaints about the new policy.

A few hours later, faced with public opposition, Jiangsu officials promised publicly that there would not be any change to the number of slots available to students in the province, at least for the time being.

On the surface, the events in Jiangsu appear to confirm the classical narrative of a restive and distrustful public rising up against Chinese authorities, and officials being forced to back down—perhaps even offer a model for future political change in China. So long as demonstrators have will and determination, the government will be compelled to concede.

But that’s misinterpreting what actually occurred.

Protests in China like the one in Nanjing rarely start spontaneously; they have to be carefully and quietly organized. Local accounts of the demonstrations indicate that the security forces and the cordon around government offices were actually there before the protests commenced. At the very least, Nanjing authorities knew something might happen and were prepared for it, but didn’t try to stop it. That’s significant because it suggests that some in the Nanjing government may have been willing to allow a certain amount of public discontent in response to the policy change; perhaps some officials weren’t altogether happy with Beijing’s decision either.

It’s also important to note that many of the protests in Jiangsu didn’t turn ugly at all. In Nanjing in particular, the local government has previously looked to dialogue instead of force to deal with local demonstrations, and it's usually been quite successful. While many observers argue that Chinese residents are clamoring for political rights, some Chinese officials acknowledge that the issue for many citizens is more often just the right to be heard.

Another possible reason for this mutual restraint is that the protests in Nanjing weren’t about changing to something new, but preserving the status quo. As united as the demonstrators might have been for the moment, their protest was about something that benefitted them directly and individually as parents and teachers—an advantage that they are simply not willing to share with others less fortunate elsewhere in China.

We need to recognize that on the 50th anniversary of the Cultural Revolution there are no rebellions or large-scale revolts on China’s horizon. Governance is overwhelmingly by directive; citizen participation appears most often when new policies take away old privileges without an opportunity for public input--not because residents seek political reform.

That may be comforting for those who fear large-scale social chaos, but it’s frustrating for those Chinese officials and residents who want greater transparency and trust to prevent simmering resentment from spilling into the streets. The recent events in Nanjing show how far away from those qualities much of China regrettably still remains.

Russell Leigh Moses has been an academic teaching Chinese politics for more than 20 years, for most of that time in China. He has been a columnist for China Real Time since 2010. Read more by Mr. Moses.


Popular on WSJ