China behind 5,343 protests: Lack of wages, crap and land disputes are coming together

5343 of them.

It’s not the official numbers of group sex incidents released in China, but the records of Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor (CDM) on China’s public protests in 2025.The project’s September 17 article said that this figure increased by 44% compared to 2024.Since the launch of the project in June 2022, its database has recorded more than 16,000 protests.

The number can easily be understood as a unified political movement if only the two words “protest” are seen, but the CDM records show the exact opposite: many people go to the streets asking for the solution of wages, housing, land, school fees, property management and other very specific life disputes.

In the second quarter of 2026,CDM recorded 846 protestsAmong the participants, the owners accounted for about 36 percent, the laborers for about 24 percent, and rural residents for about 18 percent.

In other words, a picture closer to everyday life is that of people who buy houses but don’t wait to deliver them, of workers who are indebted to wages, of villagers who conflict around land and local interests, in different cities, at different times, because different disputes go to government agencies,, or the streets.

These events do not have a unified organization with each other, nor do they necessarily have a common political claim.CDM puts them in the same database, and the value is in the ability to observe the trends that arise after the accumulation of decentralized events.

The increase in numbers does not mean that every event expands.

CDM’s own statistical methodology also has boundaries. It is mainly based on the collection of public network information events, so it can only record protests that can be discovered, verified and enter the public information space; events that are not uploaded to the network, quickly deleted or can not be verified will not be fully entered into the database. Therefore, 5,343 cannot be understood as the total official number of protests that actually occurred in China in 2025 and can not directly estimate the scale of all social conflicts.

But the network deletion itself became another set of data.

CDM previously tracked 3,000 shaking videos related to the protests, and found that about two-thirds were later deleted.The deletion could be due to different situations such as platform rules, publishers’ own deletion or censorship; Freedom House sees this as one of the evidence that Chinese cyber censorship makes grassroots protests more difficult for the public to continue to see.

This means that the researchers are facing a changing sample: a bribe may appear in the morning on a short video platform that can’t be retrieved in the afternoon; a gathering of district owners may leave dozens of cell phone videos, or just a snapshot.

Thus, the increase in the number of protests and the disappearance of information can occur simultaneously.

Data from the second quarter of 2026 also showed that economic disputes continued to be significant, with real estate adjustments leaving for delays, developers-owners conflicts, corporate operating difficulties and local fiscal and land problems likely to turn into field rights in different regions.

That’s why it’s easy to miss out what this set of data really shows when looking for a “national protest” alone.The dissatisfaction of Chinese society is often not broken out with the same slogan at the same time, but it’s being cut into a factory, a roof, a village, a school, a business.

For local governments, this decentralization allows each event to be dealt with as a specific labour, property, land or civil security issue; for researchers, it is possible to see whether they have a common economic and governance background by re-placing these events in the timeline and statistical tables.

Therefore, the most remarkable thing about the number 5,343 is not that it proves a simple political conclusion, but that it puts a large number of conflicts of life in the same table.

A worker doesn’t necessarily know the owner of a cottage in another city when he talks about wages; a villager doesn’t necessarily know that similar actions have taken place in other provinces when he deals with land issues.

And when the video then disappears from the network, the statistics left behind become a way to observe how these conflicts once occurred.