The most important factor holding Chinese society together today is coercion. Yes, it helps that the Communist Party has engineered rapid growth, but the dramatic increase in social disturbances – perhaps as many as 230,000 protests in 2009 – indicates that Chinese society is nonetheless fundamentally unstable. Analysts say that the Chinese fear chaos and that this fear will effectively keep the Party in power. Yet if that were the case, why are so many disturbances occurring today?