There is a clear rise in regional protest activities in China, the expenditure to deal with it is rising too. If those protests are an indication of social unrest tied to general opposition to state structure or a normal kind of demand that gets some level of solution-response, I can't say, or at least not correctly delineate the two things.
There are local and central government dynamics at play that is very tied to how things are dealt with, and the central government often is looked at as the solution rather than the problem where the local governments have task-based and policy implementation functions a set of things they have to meet, while the central government prioritizes legitimacy concerned and coherent long-term planning consistent with underlying political philosophy and socio-cultural integrity.
What you often see in protest situations is that the central authority comes in and gives concessions, in the form of economic or creating new officials in the local political stage after dismissing the officials that were to blame for what inspired the unrest. A lot of incidents happen because of land grabs of farms, state enterprises that affect the living conditions of people, such as house demolition to clear space for urbanization infrastructural plans.
There is a lot that happens in China as expected of a country with 1.4 billion people. But the Western popular perspectives are not correct and serves a certain propaganda image. What is important then is not to be in a reactive state and be a slave to reactionary contrarian disposition but simply look at what reliable information can give us. Human affairs are always a complex issue, what's important is understanding groundwork, the context of things.
Extraction of information from China is not always sufficiently signaled to the outside world, in many cases controlled and many play on that gap for whatever reason. That does not mean there isn't anything that happens to note, but it also doesn't need to necessitate the particular narratives either.
