According to confidential but widely circulated Chinese police estimates, there are now about 180,000 mass protest incidents each year, roughly 20 times more than there were in the mid-1990s. China’s leaders portray the surge of protests as fueled by popular outrage over the yawning gap between rich and poor -- a chasm that the leaders have spent a decade trying to close. In reality, though, Chinese citizens are angry about a different gap: the one between the powerful and the powerless, writes Martin King Whyte.
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