Assessing China’s Political and Social Stability

China is often described as a paradox: a one-party state that has presided over the fastest economic transformation in modern history, yet one whose long-term political durability is constantly questioned. For decades, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has rested its claim to power on a simple promise of rising living standards in exchange for political obedience. But as economic growth slows and social grievances mount, a central question in International Relations re-emerges: just how stable is China, really? Understanding this matters because the stability of the world’s second-largest economy directly shapes global trade, security, and the balance of power.

The economic bargain behind political stability
Three social groups under pressure
Workers and job insecurity
Peasants and rural discontent
Intellectuals and calls for political reform
How the regime manages instability
Stability maintenance and repression
Adaptation and selective reform
The Xi Jinping shift
Is China stable? Two competing views
Implications for China as a major power

The economic bargain behind political stability

To assess China’s stability, we first have to understand the foundation it rests on. The reforms launched by Deng Xiaoping in December 1978 marked a decisive turn away from Maoist central planning toward what the Party calls “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” Agriculture was decollectivised, peasants gained control over their land through the household-responsibility system, and Special Economic Zones invited foreign capital.

These reforms produced extraordinary growth and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty. But they also reshaped the relationship between the state and society. The CCP’s legitimacy shifted away from revolutionary ideology toward what scholars call performance legitimacy: the idea that the Party deserves to rule because it delivers prosperity. Andrew Nathan, the political scientist who coined the influential term “authoritarian resilience,” argued after the 1989 Tiananmen crisis that the regime survived precisely because it restored growth, expanded trade, and absorbed foreign investment rather than collapsing as many predicted.

The vulnerability of this bargain is obvious. If the economy stops delivering, the Party loses its primary justification for monopolising power. This is why China’s stability cannot be separated from its economic trajectory.

The reforms did not benefit everyone equally. Three groups in particular sit at the heart of any discussion of social stability: workers, peasants, and intellectuals. Each has distinct grievances, and each represents a different kind of risk to the regime.

Workers and job insecurity

The market reforms dismantled the old “iron rice bowl” of guaranteed lifetime employment. Today, a slowing economy, a prolonged property crisis, and declining foreign investment have translated into wage arrears, layoffs, and deteriorating conditions. Labour unrest has surged as a result. Strikes that were once concentrated in coastal manufacturing hubs like Shenzhen have spread into interior provinces, showing that economic hardship is no longer confined to a few regions.

A structural weakness compounds the problem: China’s official trade unions are extensions of the CCP rather than independent bargaining bodies. Workers therefore have few legitimate channels to press their demands, which pushes discontent toward protest. According to Freedom House’s China Dissent Monitor, labour protests in the first half of 2025 rose 66 percent compared with the same period in 2024, with strikes over unpaid wages a recurring trigger.

Peasants and rural discontent

Rural China presents a different fault line. The most common source of rural anger is land confiscation, where cash-strapped local governments seize farmland for development, often offering inadequate compensation. These disputes are widespread and emotionally charged. In one telling episode in Yunnan Province in 2024, villagers protesting over land compensation openly shouted slogans directed at the country’s top leadership, illustrating how a local economic grievance can acquire explicit political meaning.

Rural unrest has been climbing sharply. Even after Beijing introduced new rules in mid-2024 to loosen restrictions on rural land use, monitoring groups documented a continued rise in land-related protests. The persistent rural-urban income gap, reinforced by the Hukou household registration system that limits the rights of rural migrants in cities, keeps this grievance alive.

Intellectuals and calls for political reform

Intellectuals occupy a more ambiguous position. Historically, they have been the group most likely to articulate demands for political liberalisation. The 1989 pro-democracy movement was the last moment when students and intellectuals briefly forged a broad alliance with workers in calling for political reform and clean government. After the crackdown, many engaged intellectuals redirected their energy toward legal and constitutional reform or simply moved into the market economy.

The most prominent later effort was Charter 08, a manifesto authored in 2008 by Liu Xiaobo and hundreds of other activists that called for constitutional government, separation of powers, and freedom of assembly. The document was treated as “subversion of state power,” and Liu was imprisoned. This response captures the regime’s core calculation: it will tolerate economic grievances far more readily than organised demands for political change.

How the regime manages instability

If grievances are so widespread, why has China not seen the kind of regime collapse that toppled other authoritarian states? The answer lies in a sophisticated system of control and adaptation.

Stability maintenance and repression

The CCP operates an extensive apparatus the Party itself calls weiwen, or stability maintenance: an all-encompassing system of surveillance and control designed to prevent dissent from challenging its rule. Crucially, the regime has been highly effective at containing protests locally. Researchers note that it has so far prevented broad alliances from forming between rural and urban protesters, keeping rural unrest and urban grievances in separate boxes. As long as discontent stays fragmented and localised, it rarely threatens the centre.

Adaptation and selective reform

Repression is only half the story. The CCP has also shown a capacity for incremental, pragmatic reform. The introduction of village-level elections, for example, exposed a large share of the rural population to a limited democratic process while leaving Party control over higher levels of government intact. Scholars describe this approach as authoritarian resilience built on adaptability, incrementalism, and alternative sources of legitimacy such as economic performance and nationalism. The key insight is that economic growth or decline alone does not determine whether a country democratises; what matters is the regime’s ability to manage emerging challenges.

The Xi Jinping shift

Under Xi Jinping, the formula has changed. Xi has tightened political control, centralised power in his own hands, and weakened some of the institutional norms, such as limits on leadership tenure, that earlier scholars saw as the secret to the system’s durability. He rejects the idea that authoritarian states are inherently fragile, arguing instead that strong leadership and ideological discipline are what keep a state stable. Yet this concentration of power carries its own risks. By dismantling orderly succession rules, Xi has reintroduced the danger of destabilising succession battles and made the entire system more dependent on the judgement of a single leader.

Is China stable? Two competing views

Political scientists are genuinely divided on China’s future, and a balanced assessment must present both sides.

One camp emphasises resilience. They point to the CCP’s high-capacity bureaucracy, its proven ability to adapt, its tightening grip on dissent, and the way external pressure such as US-China tensions has helped Xi rally national unity. From this view, predictions of imminent collapse have been wrong for decades and remain wrong.

The other camp emphasises decay. They note that even Andrew Nathan, who originally championed the resilience thesis, later acknowledged a growing consensus that the limits of that resilience may be approaching. The evidence they cite is striking: documented protests rose roughly 50 percent in 2025, with rural unrest surging around 70 percent, while the fiscal resources local governments need to fund repression are themselves running short. Broader social strain, including high youth unemployment, weak consumer confidence, and millions of rural households dropping out of medical insurance, deepens the picture of a society under pressure.

The most reasonable conclusion sits between these poles. China is neither on the verge of collapse nor invulnerable. Its stability is real but conditional: it depends on the Party’s continued ability to manage economic discontent without that discontent becoming organised, cross-class, and political. The bargain of obedience for prosperity holds as long as prosperity, or at least hope of it, persists.

Implications for China as a major power

For International Relations, this assessment carries real weight. A China confident in its domestic stability can project power abroad and take long-term strategic risks. A China anxious about internal unrest may behave differently, sometimes turning to nationalism and assertive foreign policy to shore up legitimacy at home, and sometimes becoming more cautious to avoid external shocks that could destabilise the domestic order. Either way, the internal question of stability is inseparable from China’s external conduct as an emerging power. Observers studying China’s rise cannot treat its domestic politics as a separate matter; the two are deeply intertwined.

What do you think? If the CCP’s legitimacy rests so heavily on economic performance, what happens to its stability if slow growth becomes the permanent norm rather than a temporary phase? And do you find the “authoritarian resilience” argument or the “decay” argument more convincing when explaining why China has not faced a regime crisis despite rising protests?

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Table of Contents

The economic bargain behind political stability 🔗

Three social groups under pressure 🔗

Workers and job insecurity 🔗

Peasants and rural discontent 🔗

Intellectuals and calls for political reform 🔗

How the regime manages instability 🔗

Stability maintenance and repression 🔗

Adaptation and selective reform 🔗

The Xi Jinping shift 🔗

Is China stable? Two competing views 🔗

Implications for China as a major power 🔗