This research challenges the conventional wisdom that value-driven protests in China are exceedingly rare and face harsh state repression. Drawing on a hand-coded, multi-source dataset of over 3,100 protests in three Chinese megacities from 2014 to 2016, we identify 67 protests that reveal a hitherto unknown underbelly of everyday, value-driven contention. Qualitatively, we identify three main forms of contentious performances. Quantitatively, we show how value-driven protesters combine non-disruptive tactics with ambitious targets and virtually never extract concessions. Surprisingly, we find that such protests are less often policed and repressed than other protests. They are also never met with violence from non-state actors. We provide three interpretations for the counter-intuitive finding on repression. This study shows that the Chinese state coexists with a non-negligible amount of explicitly regime-critical contention. It adopts a containment strategy, tolerating a certain extent of value-driven performances when the risk of spill-over into wider society is limited.

How do authoritarian states respond to, and seek to defuse, popular protest? This study answers this question by developing the concept of discursive accommodation and tracing the co-evolution of contention and strategic elite communication in China. It reveals that the Chinese Communist Party leadership has responded to waves of intense unrest with increasing, yet not unconditional, sympathy for protesters. It argues that the rationale behind this response pattern has been first, to deflect discontent from the regime and, second, to temper local official and protester behavior. And yet, the unintended consequence of discursive accommodation may well have been the acceleration of mobilization. Investigating elite discourse provides an alternative angle to understand why contention in China has become endemic, but remains conspicuously moderate. It helps to unpack the one-party state’s ability of coexisting with considerable popular pressure and not be washed away by it, and managing protest without institutionalizing it.