by Andrea Ferrario

The ‘Yesterday’ observatory monitored 50 such incidents in a single month. These are fragmented initiatives, most often linked to unpaid wages. They are also fuelled by the obstacles placed in the way of the petition system, with local officials paying teams of men to discourage the submission of complaints to the relevant office in Beijing, which would cast them in a bad light. A reality that the Party prefers to hide and ignore.

 

Milan (AsiaNews) - The social unrest sweeping through Chinese society has one characteristic that sets it apart from that in most other major countries: it is a persistent phenomenon, widespread across the entire country, yet fragmented and lacking in public visibility.

The independent monitoring channel ‘Yesterday’, based in Canada and gathering testimonies from Chinese social media, documented fifty incidents of collective protest in January 2026 alone. The nature of the protests paints a picture of a society where divisions are multiplying along multiple lines. Workers, the vast majority of whom are employed in the construction sector, account for around a third of the cases, with grievances centring almost entirely on unpaid wages, factories closed or relocated without notice, and pay cuts without justification. Next come property owners, protesting over homes purchased but never completed by builders, and investors defrauded by the collapse of financial platforms, as in the striking case of the Shuibei gold and jewellery district in Shenzhen, where a billion-dollar fraud drove thousands of people to protest in the streets. Farmers, for their part, are opposing forced expropriations, years-long delays in grain payments, and even the imposition of cremation in rural communities that reject it.

These protests span over twenty provinces and municipalities and also involve major cities such as Shanghai and Shenzhen. A striking feature is the frequency of police intervention, present in around two-thirds of incidents, with beatings and arrests occurring in over a third of cases, particularly in protests linked to financial investments and land disputes in rural areas. Unlike in the case of construction workers demanding payment of back wages, where the police tend to limit themselves to containment, repression becomes much harsher when protesters challenge property interests or the prerogatives of local governments regarding land management.

The petition system: a safety valve that does not work

This widespread conflict coexists with, and partly overlaps, an institutional channel that China has maintained for centuries and which the Communist Party has inherited and adapted to its own ends: the petition system. In a country lacking freedom of information and with a judiciary subject to Party control, the possibility of submitting complaints to the National Bureau of Letters and Visits remains, at least on paper, the only legal recourse available to those subjected to abuse by local authorities. During the annual sessions of the National People’s Congress, held every March, hundreds of people flock to Beijing in an attempt to lodge their complaints, the vast majority of which concern land expropriations, arbitrary detentions and incidents of corruption at the local level. The mechanism requires the central office to register the complaint and forward it to the relevant local government, in the hope that pressure from above will produce a solution.

In practice, the outcome is almost always different. For many local administrations, the total absence of petitions has become an important performance indicator, creating a perverse incentive to prevent complaints from reaching their destination. Some provincial governments send teams of men to Beijing tasked with intercepting petitioners before they can lodge their complaints and returning them to their places of origin. Around the petitions office, in the area of the Gate of Eternal Stability, these teams openly intimidate petitioners and often detain them. An official from Shaanxi admitted that the number of people sent to monitor and block petitioners now exceeds the number of petitioners themselves.

The central government’s trend, under Xi Jinping, is to further reduce the scope of this channel. The “Fengqiao” modelof grassroots dispute management, dating back to the Maoist era, is being revived as a solution to prevent local conflicts from reaching the national level. In essence, it is a mechanism that entrusts the resolution of problems to the very local structures that generated them, thus closing the circle.

From Guangdong to Brazil, the same pattern

The data on the January protests takes on even greater significance when viewed in relation to the structural trends of the Chinese labour market. According to Freedom House data cited by Bloomberg, in 2025 workers’ protests increased by 44% compared to the previous year, with Guangdong as the main epicentre of the unrest. This is a province that exports more than the Netherlands on its own and has been the country’s industrial engine for decades, but which has lagged behind national growth for four consecutive years, dragged down by the property slump and the price war that is eroding corporate margins.

Automation, with over two million industrial robots installed, has reduced the need for permanent staff and encouraged the use of temporary workers, who at peak times account for up to two-thirds of the workforce in the industrial areas of the south. Precarious work within the so-called ‘gig economy’ now accounts for around 40% of urban employment and involves workers who are largely without health insurance, paid leave or sick pay.

Investigations carried out on construction sites and in factories in Guangdong confirm a picture in which productivity growth does not translate into wage improvements, whilst the high-tech sectors that Beijing promotes as the country’s future generate far too few jobs to compensate for those lost in construction and traditional industry.

This pattern of exploitation and precariousness is also replicated beyond China’s borders, as highlighted by a Washington Post investigation into the conditions of Chinese workers employed on the Brazilian construction sites of BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle giant.

Hundreds of workers, recruited from China’s poorest provinces with the promise of high wages, were employed in the construction of the Camaçari plant in the state of Bahia, under conditions that the Brazilian judiciary deemed tantamount to forced labour. Investigators found that passports had been confiscated, accommodation was overcrowded, shifts were worked without breaks and wages were lower than agreed, as part of a system of rights violations that began as early as the recruitment phase in China. This case forms part of a wider picture, as similar allegations have also affected BYD construction sites in Hungary.

Beyond local differences, the thread linking these events is the same: the conditions of less-skilled Chinese workers are deteriorating on multiple fronts simultaneously, whilst the institutional channels through which to voice discontent are being progressively curtailed. Censorship prevents these incidents from coalescing into a collective perception of the problem, and the geographical and social fragmentation of protests ultimately serves to maintain the stability of the system. Construction workers in Fujian have no way of knowing about the plight of defrauded investors in Shenzhen, who in turn are unaware of the mobilisation of farmers in Yunnan against compulsory cremation. Each incident arises and fades away at a local level, leaving no trace in the public discourse.

Beneath the surface of a country that presents itself to the world as a cohesive technological power, a widespread and pervasive social conflict manifests itself with a frequency that the authorities would prefer to ignore, but which reality makes increasingly difficult to conceal. The fragility referred to by some observers of China increasingly concerns the very political stability of the system itself, which is being tested by an economic model in crisis that constantly shifts the costs of economic imbalances onto workers and the working classes.

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