James Fallows has a good article, “China’s Way Forward.” He writes:

… the “China is over” hypothesis seems to miss important cultural and political realities. Its unspoken premise is that average Chinese people just barely tolerate the social bargain the government now offers—limited freedom, potentially unlimited wealth. So if the regime ever falls short on its material promises, the deal will be off and people will rebel.

This does not square with what I have seen. I have often wondered why so many people in different roles and regions in China seem vivid… I think it is because being in China today is like being in Western Europe in the 1950s. No one’s family story is dull or uneventful. People doing routine jobs have been through great hardships and dramatic swings of fate… A scholar I know in Beijing once offhandedly remarked that he had developed self-confidence when learning that he could survive for four years as a teenager on a labor gang during the Cultural Revolution. People in their teens and 20s were not on the labor gangs—kids today!—but they have heard the stories.

Anyone that wants to press the ‘things are bad in China’ narrative needs to confront the fact that the situation is far better than ever before in modern Chinese history, especially episodes like the Cultural Revolution. The party has dealt with worse episodes of unemployment, and the populace has survived much worse episodes of poverty. That being said, there are plenty of people who gripe about the government, and will articulate in very clear terms, “I can’t vote; but so long as I have a job and can feed my family, it doesn’t matter.” But Fallows is exactly right – no one continues with “and if I lose my job I’m marching to the county office with violent intent.” (To be fair, people with actual violent intent would do best by keeping quiet, especially around whitie). 

That’s the crux – if large scale social change occurs here, it won’t be from just one source. The party seems to have done a good job of co-opting resistive impulses towards ancillary state organs (see O’Brien and Li’s Rightful Resistance in Rural China). So long as the central government remains the only channel with which to take action against corrupt local officials [the cognitive leap required for disassociation of the two entities is still unclear], energies that would otherwise go to more revolutionary activities can be more easily controlled. Personally I’m not so sure that’s such a bad thing, in so far as the system can adopt more efficient and democratic means without massive upheaval. That being said, I fully expect to be very surprised in the coming years.