As global financiers tried in late 2024 to predict how much stimulus Xi Jinping would roll out to boost China’s faltering economy, government censorship of China’s economic data drove them to a surprising alternative source: a public database tracking protests in China. Money managers began parsing data about economic and labour protests as a metric to understand how severe the country’s downturn really was.
This data defied Beijing’s efforts to project optimism and claim that its political system safeguards prosperity while preventing unrest. The data showed that economy-related protests rose 41 percent in the fourth quarter of 2024, the highest of any quarter since the database launched in 2022.
Source: China Dissent Monitor, via Bloomberg.
The protest data, part of a project known as China Dissent Monitor (CDM) and hosted by US nonprofit Freedom House, is the last existing public database of grassroots protests in China. It is maintained by a small team in Taipei that scrapes Chinese social media platforms daily to collect information about demonstrations happening in real time, before censors can remove the posts. The team has logged more than 10,000 protests since its launch in 2022.
But the entire project may shut down within a few months, due to the Trump administration’s deep cuts to State Department grant funding for human rights and pro-democracy initiatives. On 11 July, the Trump administration made those cuts permanent and shut down the office responsible for managing those grants. The Chinese Communist Party has already shuttered the handful of China-based organisations doing similar work. If CDM goes dark too, the world will lose an entire category of knowledge about how people in China are actually experiencing life under CCP governance.
CDM’s work to document local protests ‘shows that China has serious social conflicts’ that are ‘exacerbated by China’s political system,’ Maya Wang, associate China director at the US-based advocacy group Human Rights Watch, said. ‘This is the opposite of what the Chinese government claims internationally.’
The protest database ‘punctures the myth that the Chinese government keeps propagating that Chinese people have a different perception of the world and that they really support the Chinese Communist Party,’ Wang said.
Unlike in democracies, where protests are freely tweeted, livestreamed, broadcast on TV, covered by media, tracked by civil society organisations and even joined by elected officials, protests in China—especially small local protests—often leave no trace. The Chinese government once provided tallies of these so-called mass incidents but stopped publishing those statistics in 2006. Its last public tally, released in 2005, noted 87,000 such incidents. Nowadays, Chinese authorities quickly shut down many protests and remove any mention of them from media and social media.
The consequences of this censorship are profound. When this information isn’t available, independent observers struggle to gauge the scale of popular discontent in China, the types of issues driving grievances, and how conditions change over time. This, in turn, makes it harder to assess the Chinese government’s assertions that its policies, and its governance model, are successful. The censorship isolates struggling Chinese communities from each other, denying them the opportunity to connect and learn from the experiences of others dealing with common concerns.
The resulting information void ripples outward, crippling the work of researchers, economists and journalists, who rely on data to inform their work. It also amplifies the effects of other forms of information control, such as Xi Jinping’s crackdown on independent journalists, most of whom have been jailed, expelled, or forced out of the profession. China has more than 100 cities with populations greater than one million, but the remaining journalists working for foreign (uncensored) media outlets are stationed almost exclusively in a handful of megacities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, leaving most cities with no independent journalists at all.
That’s where CDM comes in. The research team uses specialised techniques constantly updated to stay one step ahead of Chinese censors – to capture media and social media mentions of protests before they are removed. Each incident is then added to a searchable database. The team also incorporates data provided by individual activists who track incidents from social media sources, such as Lu Yuyu, a Chinese national now living in Canada who was once jailed in China for his work documenting protests. CDM also relied on data provided by Hong Kong-based advocacy organisation China Labor Bulletin, which logged labour-related protests—until it was shut down in June amid Beijing’s ongoing crackdown in the city.
Journalists use CDM’s database to help provide larger context to stories that might otherwise rely on anecdotes or incomplete data. While CDM researchers believe they capture only a fraction of the protests that occur each year—many protesters likely avoid posting information about their activities on social media for fear of official retaliation—the project still enables data-based analysis by chronology and protest type. By the team’s own count, more than 2,000 media articles have cited CDM since its founding, including in the The Economist, The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Reuters, and the BBC.
CDM’s work can also help pierce the fog of China’s vast media deserts, uncovering multi-city protest movements that would otherwise have gone wholly unnoticed outside of China. In late 2024, for example, a wave of shareholder rights demonstrations spread to 11 cities after a new law was set to boost the power of creditors. After the protests, China’s top law-making body stepped in to weaken the law. CDM tracked these protests, then shared its findings with Reuters, which published the first independent report about the protest movement and how it successfully moved the central government to change the law.
‘CDM has shown that despite all of the time and resources invested in destroying civil society and preventing social movements, decentralised protests movements still occur,’ CDM’s research lead Kevin Slaten said.
People throughout China often struggle with similar issues, from local government corruption to exploitation by real estate developers to the environmental fallout from decades of unbridled economic development. Knowing that other people in China have protested and sometimes even won government concessions on these very issues ‘changes your view of your own agency,’ Slaten said. ‘It’s an extremely powerful idea, that protests can change things, even in an authoritarian country. So for Chinese citizens, that information is empowering, and they have a right to this.’
But this information is about to evaporate. In February, the State Department suspended all grant funding, crippling the operations of an entire ecosystem of nonprofit organisations in the US and around the world who work on democracy and human rights and relied on US funding. After a review process, some grants were restarted, but many were not. The US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, which managed grants totalling up to $1.3 billion, was effectively shuttered last week.
Freedom House has been deeply affected: it lost almost 90 percent of its funding and slashed staff and programs. CDM lost its entire budget. The team was able to secure transitional funding to continue scaled-back operations for a few more months, but that money will run out at the end of July. There will soon be no money to pay staff or to maintain the website and software that supports the database. As a final effort to keep the database online just a little longer, CDM has launched a crowd-funding campaign.
There is no easy funding fix. US government grants are one of the few sources of reliable funding for China-focused human rights nonprofits. That’s because the Chinese government, which controls the world’s second-largest economy, has linked access to its enormous markets with acquiescence to its authoritarian demands—an extraordinarily effective way of starving global dissent. The private sector, fearing economic retaliation from Beijing, largely shies away from supporting organisations that do work the Chinese government opposes. Philanthropists and the organisations they fund often have similar fears, as do the governments of smaller countries whose economies are dependent on trade with China. And for the small pot of alternate funding that is available, CDM must now compete with the many other organisations suddenly facing a fiscal cliff.
But CDM’s financial needs, and those of other organisations supporting China’s beleaguered civil society, are not immense. This is an opportunity for democratic governments in the region to make a real difference. Japan, Taiwan and Australia have funded work on China, and their intervention in this time of need could demonstrate a new leadership and a joint sense of purpose in an era of new challenges.
This article has been corrected to state the name of China Labor Bulletin as such.