“For years, the Chinese Communist Party has spent enormous sums on ‘stability maintenance’ in an effort to achieve comprehensive control over society. Yet from the large numbers of self-organized ‘e-parents’ who emerged during the ‘Xiao Luoxi Incident’ late last year, to the recent ‘Avoid the Plague God’ movement involving more than one million merchants in Heilongjiang, Zhejiang, Jiangsu, and elsewhere, and now the ‘Wangwang Storm’ and the ‘Zhuzhiliao Incident,’ these developments all point to the same trend: as traditional spaces for organization have been severely compressed, Chinese society is continually generating new forms of spontaneous, collaborative protest that are more decentralized and harder to detect and suppress in advance.
The contest between a regime seeking to ‘control everything’ and a society continually finding new ways to reconnect and re-engage in public affairs is far from over.”