The chart reminds us that China is a large and heterogeneous country—and, as it happens, social unrest isn’t a national referendum. You don’t need a majority vote from a whole country to get popular protest that can threaten to reorder national politics; you just need to reach a critical point, and that point can often be reached with a very small fraction of the total population. So, instead of looking at national tendencies to infer national risk, we should look at the tails of the relevant distributions to see if they’re getting thicker or longer. The people and places at the wrong ends of those distributions represent pockets of potential unrest; other things being equal, the more of them there are, the greater the cumulative probability of relevant action.
