Issue 12: April–June 2026

Highlights

• 846 protests in the quarter. CDM logged 846 dissent events in the second quarter of 2026. While this is a 45 percent decrease compared to the second quarter of 2025, a substantial intensification of government censorship this year (discussed below) is likely responsible for much of the difference. The leading group for protests were homeowners (36 percent), followed by workers (24 percent), and rural residents (18 percent). The remainder were led by diverse groups including parents and students, small business owners, investors, consumers, petitioners, and activists. The top provinces for protest events were Guangdong (14 percent), Hebei, Shaanxi, Henan, and Shandong. CDM has logged a total of 15,820 cases of dissent since data collection began in June 2022.
• Government censorship campaign reduced available protest information. On February 12, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) announced a campaign directing social media platforms to take down and reduce the visibility of content that “incites negative feelings.” This order came in the weeks before the Two Sessions—the annual meetings of the Chinese Communist Party’s rubber-stamp legislature and its political advisory body. Like a similar censorship campaign documented by CDM at the start of 2024, this campaign appears to have resulted in a persistent drop in dissent information published on social media. CDM’s preliminary analysis estimates a 50-percent reduction in protest posts on Douyin (the Chinese version of TikTok) from March to June, compared to the year before the campaign began.
• Homeowner protest increasingly driven by property-management conflict. CDM analysis of 3,250 homeowner protests since 2023 indicates that protester grievances have gradually shifted from property developers to property-management companies, typically concentrated around unreasonable fees, repurposing common areas, or use of shared homeowner maintenance funds. This is occurring as financial strain on real estate companies has placed mounting operational pressure on their property-management arms. CDM has also documented a rise in cases of protest involving owners’ committees and homeowner efforts to self-organize, often in response to conflict with property managers.
• Individual suffering can prompt large-scale protest. CDM has documented at least 28 instances since 2024 of cases where personal tragedy or harm to life has prompted hundreds of people to mobilize, typically directing grievances at local officials for inadequate or unjust responses. A major protest in Chongqing in June 2026 marked the first time one of these events was prompted by animal abuse. Such cases show that individual tragedies have the potential to spark rapid, large-scale mobilization over public-interest issues and governance in China.
• Small businesses protest for fairness. There were more protests by shop owners, suppliers, distributors, and other owners of small businesses in the first half of 2026 than any other period since 2022, likely reflecting financial consequences for these groups of China’s sluggish domestic consumption. There also appears to be increasingly frequent repression of small businesses’ protests since the beginning of 2025.