ABSTRACT
Popular protests are on the rise in China. There has been an enormous increase in contentious episodes in China since the early 1990s, a growing proportion of them large-scale. At the same time a shift in Chinese dissident movements has been observed from direct and confrontational tactics in the 1980s to increasingly indirect and legal tactics in the 1990s and 2000s. In recent years, popular protest has taken place in rather moderate forms and in a decentralized pattern. The most common form of popular contention today seeks redress of routine instances of injustice for which victims hold the governments and its agents accountable. Such protest clearly benefits from the revolution the Internet has brought about in political communication. It facilitates a free flow of information, provides alternative information sources, helps to promote the public sphere and civil society, and it can be used as an effective tool for organized collective action.
