Why are protests on the rise in China?

0:02Helen-Ann Smith:Sky News. The full story first.

0:09Coming up, there's been a dramatic rise in protests across China. Ordinary people taking extraordinary risk to be heard. Our Asia correspondent Helen-Ann Smith has witnessed it firsthand and she joins us next.

0:25When you think of China, you don't tend to think of dissent, such as the control that the Chinese Communist Party, or CCP, has on its nation. But recently, something shifted. Protests that were once rare are now happening with increasing regularity.

0:40Helen-Ann Smith:Please, hey, please, hey, stop, stop. Please, stop, stop, no one's on, please, stop, stop, please, please. Well, that was the moment our Asia correspondent, Helen Ann Smith, was stopped from filming a a group of striking workers in Shenzhen. As she and her team discovered, when protests do happen, the state responds swiftly. But new analysis suggests that despite the risks, there's been a dramatic rise in domestic protest year on year. Most of them are economic in nature, but the frustration runs far deeper. So what's driving this rise? How is Beijing dealing with it? And what does the risk taken by those protesters tell us about China today?

1:16Elinan is back on The Daily. Elinan, great to have you back on the podcast. Look, your travels take you pretty much the length and breadth of China. The latest was to a place called Shenzhen. What took you there?

1:29Helen-Ann Smith:We essentially heard kind of via social media and via sources that there was this strike happening in a factory in Shenzhen. Let me tell you about Shenzhen. It's a city in the south of China. It's literally just across the border from Hong Kong. It is a centre for industry and manufacturing. It's very high tech. There's lots of glassy skyscrapers. It's a very modern, very expensive city, actually. But there are a lot of plants there with a lot of migrant workers who are working on these factory lines. And thus, it has been a bit of a center for sort of economic worker-related protests, just by virtue of the fact there's a lot of businesses there and a lot of factories there.

2:07Helen-Ann Smith:So we got this whiff of the fact this protest was going on, this strike that had been going on for a couple of days, which is unusual in China. So we hurried down there and it was in this sort of industrial corner, not really in the centre of the city, not where all the glassy skyscrapers were. We turned up early in the morning and it was, yeah, quite something to behold. What did you see when you got there? So we arrived very early because we knew that in the previous days, the striking workers had sort of essentially turned up to work at the start of the day, but not gone into the factory. But first we had to watch them from afar because, as always in China, things like protests are so sensitive.

2:40Helen-Ann Smith:And as soon as the police see Western journalists, they'd be on us and it would be very difficult to operate. So we held back. We sat in the car. We watched them from afar. And we watched them come out in their sort of blue overalls, these kind of striking workers and this big line of police kind of surrounding them. And there was just this real kind of atmosphere of tension, I think, in the air, I think is fair to describe. There was onlookers watching because, of course, it's a relatively unusual thing. And the protesters, they stood pretty quietly to start with, to be honest, as is, I think, quite commonly the way in Chinese protests.

3:15Helen-Ann Smith:Because look, protesting in China is a very, very risky thing to do. If you scream and you shout and you make a nuisance, the police will clear you away. They'll arrest you straight away. But you could tell absolutely straight away just how, you know, upset people were. Do we know why they were protesting in the first place? In this particular instance, essentially they were striking because they said a bunch of the factory's production capacity has moved abroad to Vietnam, where costs are frankly cheaper than they are in China nowadays. And they were essentially saying that because of that, their hours had been reduced and their take home pay was just frankly so low that they couldn't even pay rent.

3:49Helen-Ann Smith:We had a woman we spoke to who was in tears just saying, you know, how can I possibly live on£200 a month in a city like this? I can't. And so it was moving, but tension in the air for sure. For people to take to the streets and protest in any part of the world, you make a decision to do so. To do so in China with the knowledge that the police will be there and be there quickly. I mean, it's a difficult decision for these individuals to have made in the first place, isn't it? I think that's a really important point when you talk about protest in China, because it does happen, but there is a risk.

4:21Helen-Ann Smith:There's always a risk for people in China. The bar above which you might get arrested is unbelievably lower than what it would be in the Western world. If you're protesting about something a little bit more political or a little bit more serious, or you behave in a slightly less compliant way as part of your protest, you genuinely risk arrest and detention. You genuinely risk being surveilled by authorities for a undefined period of time going forward, months, perhaps years. You do risk your family getting harassed. You do risk, if it's very serious type of political protest, you risk your family losing their jobs.

4:57And so I

4:59Helen-Ann Smith:desperate people see their situations to be. They really feel like they don't have many other options. But B, I think also just a reflection of how few other places they can go with their grievances. You know, there is not trade unions. There's no advocacy groups anymore. There's no NGOs that used to be the conduit to some people's grievances of these things. A lot of that stuff has been shut down in Xi Jinping's China. So it is a really big statement to take to the streets. Were you able to get any closer to the actual protest? We had to plan it quite carefully. We got out of the car initially to try and talk to some people.

5:28Helen-Ann Smith:And we did that around the corner because we knew, again, we had to, this is often the way in China, by the way, you have to speak to people quickly, away from the eyes of the authorities, because once they've seen you, it will be very difficult to speak to anyone. They won't allow you to do that. But we then made a decision once we'd spoken to someone, we made a decision to get closer. We knew that once we'd done that, we would sort of break our cover. We went once, we were quickly hurried away. And we were then kind of joined by representatives from the local Ministry for Foreign Affairs. And we decided to go back one more time to get right up to the front line.

5:58Helen-Ann Smith:But when we did that, the authorities made it pretty clear that they weren't having any of this. And very, very quickly, it was hands in the lenses. It was a lot of screaming, a lot of shouting. My cameraman was dragged away by a couple of police. The camera was wrenched out of his hand. There was a lot of what felt like quite threatening treatment. For a moment, it was quite frightening. We were forced, not physically forced, but sort of vocally forced into cars and we were driven away and we were taken to a kind of a holding area, if you like, where we were with the police and the local authorities for about three hours.

6:34Helen-Ann Smith:As I said, when we were there, we weren't mistreated. We weren't physically harmed. It's important to say that. But I think the experience, the swiftness, the tone of the reaction, you know, says something quite clear. Look, China sees this stuff as deeply sensitive and it does not want its protests to be seen. The foreign journalists turning up is unbelievably alarming to them. But one thing I would just like to say as well, Neil, is that when the protesters saw us, they started cheering, cheering and chanting. And it was quite profound, really, because I think that says something quite poignant about the fact that people do actually want their voices to be heard.

7:11Helen-Ann Smith:These are blue collar workers in a country that is systematically told that foreign journalists are the enemy and they were happy to see us. And I think that is quite telling. I suppose that also suggests that it is rare for your average citizen of China to be aware of protests taking place in and around the country. Yeah, that's absolutely right. Because what happens is that, you know, these protests do happen. People film them, people put them up on social media. But there is an army of censors in China that rip this stuff down from social media really, really quite quickly. It's really hard to document what's going on.

7:44Helen-Ann Smith:And you might have dozens, perhaps hundreds of protests around the country about the same issue, but they don't collaborate or coordinate with each other because coordinating is seen as a much, much more politically difficult thing to do. People's communications are monitored. There's a lot of pre-censorship that happens. So either people self-censoring or indeed certain words or certain pictures that are kind of pre-censored and barred and you physically can't upload them, that happens. And then once things make it to the internet, the sensors spend time taking them down, often really quite quickly.

8:16Helen-Ann Smith:So for a lot of people in China, they really just might not know at all that this stuff is happening. And they might not know that there are people in the neighbouring province who are facing a similar issue to what they are. It's difficult to kind of quantify exactly what people know and exactly what they don't know. Of course, information gets out, of course, things are shared. But it is much more difficult to do that than it is in the West. Can we put numbers on just how widespread protest is in China? No, I think is the short answer to that. But what we can do is we can put numbers to the trend.

8:47Helen-Ann Smith:And that's because there are organisations that have spent time monitoring this and assessing this and doing data analysis on what they're finding. So as part of this story, we were given data by an organization called China Descent Monitor. It's a research group that's part of a US-based NGO freedom house. And essentially, they have, over the last three and a half years, been methodically tracking this type of protest. And they're quite open about the fact that what they're tracking is almost certainly not exhaustive. They can't find everything, but they are confident their methodology has been consistent enough over time that they can make fair assessments about changes.

9:23Helen-Ann Smith:And what they're saying is that just what they've captured last year in 2025, we're talking about over 5 ,000 protests. And when you compare the first 11 months of the year, so January to November, there has been a 48 % rise on what was seen the year before in 2024. So 48%. And the lead researcher said to me, look, if we were looking at 5 % change or 10%, you might put that down to kind of methodological problems or you might just not be able to make substantive conclusions based on that sort of stuff. But 48%, even if there's a margin of error, we are definitely talking about a rise in protests.

10:03Helen-Ann Smith:And crucially, he said as well, they are absolutely not capturing everything because of the issues that we previously spoke about. What is the nature of the protests? What are they rebelling against? There's all sorts of different things that upset people. You know, we've seen everything from land protests where people have had their land taken from them in order to make way for construction in rural areas. There's unpaid wages from factories. That's quite a common one. There's things like a lot of people protesting about they've lost life savings because they put money down on flats, apartments that were then not completed because of a big crash in the housing market.

10:38Helen-Ann Smith:There's things like anger over school districts and perceived unfairness within the school system. When you take the three and a half years of data that the China descent monitors gathered, they said 85 % are about economic grievances, 85%. And that's, I think, quite telling because China's economy is not in a particularly good state right now. You know, it has had periods of deflation in recent years. Consumer spending is really, really sluggish. That's a huge problem for them. I mentioned the housing market. That's been a big problem. There's very high youth unemployment. Then you have Donald Trump and his tariffs.

11:13Helen-Ann Smith:That's wreaked more havoc in China's economy. So look, it is not the kind of the glory days of China's economy that we saw sort of 10, 20 years ago, we were talking about 10 % growth. It's really slowed. And that's had a big impact on people and people's lives. What does China say about protests within its borders, about the right to protest within its borders? Theoretically, protest in China is legal. It's not actually illegal. It's just in practice, it's incredibly difficult to stage. And China would very much say that dissent is absolutely a minority here. And I think to a degree, that's fair, because let's be fair about this, that people have grievances in China, of course, but there are also many, many, many millions of people who are prosperous, much, much more so than they were 10 or 20 years ago.

12:00Helen-Ann Smith:There are a lot of people who truly believe in the CCP and what they're doing. They believe that Xi Jinping and his current government have really restored a lot of China's greatness that has perhaps not been there in recent decades. And millions and millions of people support the system. They do. So I think you do need to keep that balance in mind when you're talking about this. And people might also indeed have very localized grievances against smaller companies or against their employers. And they might not always link that to the central system. And I think we have to be a little careful to always kind of ascribing what people must be feeling inside when we can't really know the answers to that.

12:34Helen-Ann Smith:And I think that's an important thing to keep in mind when we're talking about protests and dissent in China as well. How aware is the average Chinese citizen of what is taking place outside their borders? I mean, do they know the battle that China and the United States have been locked in when it comes to the tariffs that have been imposed? What Chinese people are told about what's going on outside is very much dependent on whether it suits the government's narrative for them to know it. when it comes to kind of the China versus America tariffs and whatnot, yeah, Chinese people absolutely know about that.

13:03Helen-Ann Smith:And they know about it because a kind of anti-America propaganda is always a relatively useful thing for the Chinese when it comes to kind of bad things that America have done. That's normally known. What's kind of less known is things that are harmful to China's narrative of greatness, that are harmful to China's plan, or that might give its citizens too many ideas, if you like. Well, Iran, for example, of course, we have seen for days now protests across the country. I mean, that's the sort of thing that I would imagine would make the CCP very, very uneasy. That's absolutely right. Very, very uneasy indeed.

13:40Helen-Ann Smith:And such a good example, isn't it, of how economic protest can become political really quickly. and that's exactly what's happened in Iran and that's exactly what the CCP fear. I mean, what's happening in Iran is its worst nightmare. It's just worth saying, of course, China is not Iran. It's a significantly more functional country. Yes, its citizens have some oppressive measures on them, but they are, I think, not as oppressed as the people of Iran are for a whole variety of reasons. So they're not the same country. They're not the same place. But China will be watching what's happening in Iran with alarm.

14:13Helen-Ann Smith:They're sort of broadly aligned, but in a sort of fair weather sort of way. China's quite pragmatic with these types of allegiances. It likes to have strong partners in regions. It likes to have weights against its kind of biggest adversary, the United States, of course. If Iran were to fall, it would not be good news for China. It has energy deals there. It has investment deals there. It's not enormously exposed, but it's sort of on the kind of practical economic financial point, it will be reasonably pragmatic. But it's not a good look, is it? Autocratic regimes falling as a result of mass protest is not a good look for China.

14:47Helen-Ann Smith:And be in no doubt the leaders here will be watching it very closely. It does feel that we are entering another era of bipolar geopolitics, of superpower against superpower. And given all that, I'm wondering what President Xi and others within the CCP think about what took place in Venezuela. The kidnapping, let's call it what it is, of Nicolas Maduro by Donald Trump. I mean, again, that's not the sort of thing that I imagine Xi would be very pleased to see. Yeah, not very pleased at all. And actually, the whole thing arguably was a little bit of an embarrassment for China because just hours before Maduro was captured, I mean, there was quite a senior Chinese delegation visiting Caracas.

15:26Helen-Ann Smith:And it's being seen as a pretty significant intelligence failure from the Chinese. And for a system that doesn't like to lose face, it's really not great at all. Look, absolutely, they will not like the idea that its greatest adversary, the United States, has sort of wielded this huge kind of unilateral power moving to take out what is a strategic partner within the region. Worth saying that, again, the Chinese pretty pragmatic when it came to Venezuela. They knew that the system was a bit of a liability. So they had moved to sort of shield and protect themselves from their financial interests.

15:57Helen-Ann Smith:Yes, China buys Venezuelan oil, but actually as a proportion of what China imports, it's not an enormous amount. But they will not like a partner in the region falling. They will not like the fact that the US is now controlling these vast oil reserves that Venezuela has. But I don't think China will move to kind of get involved in either of these countries at this stage. Again, this country is extremely pragmatic, be in no doubt it will be moving behind the scenes to kind of shore up its interests. It will be taking some lessons. What could it unilaterally move to do without having to worry about the kind of ire of international criticism?

16:33I don't think it will immediately

16:35Helen-Ann Smith:hasten the invasion of Taiwan. China has its plan and it's a plan of coercion and peaceful unification. I think it will stick to that. But look, there's been a lot of change in the world in the last couple of weeks, hasn't there? And China's a big player and it is watching closely. Given everything that is happening external to China, does this rise in protest, this rise in obvious dissent against the leadership of the country, does that yet pose an existential risk, do you think, to the CCP project? I think in the short term, no. I think the reality is that this system is just so powerful. People aren't able to coordinate even if they wanted to.

17:12Helen-Ann Smith:They're not able to discuss. They're not able to link up how broad certain grievances might be. That's even if they wanted to. I think it's really important to say that actually, I think most Chinese people actually don't want to see the overpower of the CCP. They see it as a party that's brought them prosperity, that's brought them growth, that's brought China greater prestige on the world stage, that's brought China greater strength. And, you know, the propaganda system here is so mighty and so successful that I think the notion that somehow, you know, small bits and bobs of protest, albeit frequent, but small, is somehow destabilising, I think is just not the reality that we're living in.

17:50Strip away the politics, though, just for a second. And given China's long history of locking people up that it disagrees with. You've got to say anyone who takes to the streets of China in protest is a brave, brave individual indeed.

18:02Helen-Ann Smith:I think that's right. I think people are very brave. You know, again, I think there was something quite sort of profound about the people kind of cheering when they saw us. And I think, you know, China has been so successful over so many years of painting this picture to the outside world that people here are content with their lot, that they are not particularly interested in liberal ideas of the freedom of the media and the freedom of expression, the freedom of gathering. I think the reality is that that's just not true. They might not want to see the overthrow of their government, but they really want their wages to be paid.

18:37Helen-Ann Smith:And if their wages aren't paid, and then the system that they want to complain to doesn't exist, and then they're not allowed to post on social media about it, and then they're arrested for asking for their wages to be paid, that leads to discontent. and that leaves people feeling deeply, deeply unhappy. You know, you have to remember that there are many millions of people here that don't enjoy the same freedoms of expression and freedoms of protest that are enjoyed in other parts of the world and I think that's important to keep those people at the heart of this type of discussion. Helen Ann, many thanks.

19:07To see Helen Ann's full reports, including the moment she and her team were escorted away, just head to the website skynews.com. Bye for now.