Stability Maintenance, Preventive Repression, and Contentious Politics in China under Xi Jinping’s Rule

The recent authoritarian turn in Chinese politics under Xi Jinping has invigorated interest in the concept of “public security,” a metamorphosis of the term “weiwen” (stability maintenance) fashioned by his predecessor Hu Jintao. Both concepts emphasize a preventive repression that involves a whole-of-society approach to preserving social order. Drawing on an original protest dataset and the Chinese government statistics on public security spending, we conduct an empirical study of the repression-protest nexus to investigate the extent to which the Chinese state has been effective in preempting social contention. While we find correlational evidence of increased security spending and a decline in protests, this provides modest support for the strategy’s effectiveness. Despite political tightening under Xi, we find evidence for increased frequency, larger size, and pluralization of grievances for protests during his rule. Overall, our methodological approach allows us to compare contention and repression between the Hu–Wen and Xi periods and to investigate the empirical evidence for preventive repression, which lies at the core of the Chinese approach to the preservation of social order.