But what is perhaps most remarkable, and remarkably typical, of the Wukan movement was the protesters' insistence on declaring fealty to the Chinese Communist Party. Though China's 2011 could have possibly seen more mass demonstrations than the entire Arab world, this is one reason that China probably remains far away from an Arab Spring-style revolutionary movement. Popular movements here seem to express relatively narrow complaints, want to work within the system rather than topple it, and treat the Communist Party as legitimate. Protests appear to be part of the system, not a challenge to it -- a sort of release valve for popular anger that, if anything, could have actually strengthened the Party by giving them a way to address that anger while maintaining autocratic rule. In the absence of real democracy, this give-and-take between state and society could actually help maintain political stability in China -- for now.

That tradition goes back at least a decade, to a climax of labor movement protests in spring 2002. In the steel city of Liaoyang that May, thousands of workers massed in protest. Corrupt local officials had siphoned small fortunes out of the town's factories, forcing many of them to shut down and send their workers home without their pensions, which the officials had also plundered. Liaoyang's problems then, like Wukan's today, were not atypical: the national movement toward privatization had given party officials special access, allowing them to get rich overnight as part of a new and burgeoning crony capitalist class while powerless workers went hungry.

As in Wukan last month, Liaoyang's 2002 protest was exceptional for its size -- tens of thousands marched over several days, shutting down the city and forcing senior Communist Party officials to respond -- but its leaders deliberately stopped short, even after being attacked by security forces, of publicly questioning the Communist Party's total rule. They wrote letters to senior officials, whom they addressed as "respected elder" or "beloved," emphasizing that the protesters were loyal to the Communist Party and asking only for those officials to enforce preexisting laws against corruption.

Philip Pan, a former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief, reported in his 2008 book Out of Mao's Shadow that the protest leaders privately agreed that single-party rule was the underlying cause of Liaoyang's problems, but were afraid to publicly criticize it or call for democracy and ultimately decided to appeal to senior Party leaders rather than challenge them.



As long as the political system remained unchanged, they agreed, those with positions of power could always abuse it, and workers could hope only for marginal improvements in their lives. For real progress, they thought democratic reform was necessary, and they believed that most workers supported such a goal. But they also knew that persuading workers to participate in a protest advocating democratic change would be all but impossible. The workers had internalized the lessons of the Tiananmen massacre. Everybody knew that the party would quickly crush a direct challenge to its authority, and nobody wanted to go to prison. People were too afraid.

The memory of Tiananmen has faded in the decade since 2002. But the dynamic of China's hundreds of daily demonstrations has remained the same. So has the Party's uncanny ability to keep dissent both "within-system" and small-scale, almost never revolutionary in nature or even publicly critical of the autocracy inherent in Communist Party rule.