Popular protests in China have reached huge proportions in recent years, with 87,000 separate incidents reported in 2005 compared to 8,700 in 1993 and 32,000 in 1999. Most of them are protests against local corruption, land confiscations and arbitrary action by officials and companies caught up in the industrial and social transformation of the country under way since the early 1980s.
This is the other side of the frenetic economic growth which has created a new middle class of perhaps 150 million people, the uprooting of some 200 million from the Chinese countryside and stark inequalities between them and the 800 million still on the land.
It is a reminder of how audacious was the political gamble taken by the communist leadership in creating a market-based society where the pace of growth must continue to outstrip the rate of unrest if there are to be more winners than losers.
So far it has paid off. But the sheer number of these social movements and their growing scale have caused an outbreak of public debate within the ruling party about how the process should be managed and what political institutional reforms are necessary to preserve social and political stability.
More protests are being publicly reported. Certain courageous leaders have acquired a national name and therefore a certain protection from state repression. In recent days activists involved in local protests and religious movements have gone on hunger strike in an effort to gain national and international support.
The repertoire of issues they raise include vicious beatings of lawyers involved in village conflicts over land confiscations and a growing determination that they be resisted.
Communist party leaders are touring the countryside warning against "historic errors" committed by local officials and encouraging exemplary trials and punishments.
There is a growing debate on what political concessions can be made, including policing and legal reform - but no indication that more fundamental change in the one-party system is contemplated. Party representatives increasingly underline how important it is for China's stability that this immense transformation has taken place under their central control.
They make a strong case, notwithstanding the inherently arbitrary and authoritarian nature of this system of rule. But if they are to maintain control without another political convulsion comparable to the bloody suppression of the Tiananmen pro-democracy movement in 1989, a more ambitious reform programme will have to be undertaken.
These are interesting times in the biggest communist country in the world.