Impressed by the scale and intensity of these incidents, some foreign media have portrayed them as preludes to a bigger wave of grassroots resistance that could crack open the authoritarian state.
We cannot rule out this possibility, only time will tell; but we should not forget that similar waves of confrontational protests were far from rare throughout the two decades after 1989. In the 1990s and 2000s, the media took a similar line on the plentiful rural tax riots, militant protests of laid-off workers, and confrontations triggered by other sources. They cast them as precursors to a larger-scale movement that could radically change the status quo. But these waves of unrest came and went, and the party-state remained venerated.
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