The way the Chinese government is behaving right now, you’d almost think it had converted to democracy. Half a dozen times in recent weeks, government officials have backed down in the face of angry citizen protests ― canceling unpopular industrial projects, freeing wrongly imprisoned citizens or arresting one of its own for his reprehensible behavior.

That’s not how a communist dictatorship is supposed to behave.

The most notorious example involves Tang Hui from Yongzhou City in southern China. Thugs kidnapped her 11-year-old daughter, beat and gang-raped her, then forced her into prostitution for more than three months. Chinese media reported that she served one or more customers every single day.

Needless to say, her mother was quite upset. She berated the police relentlessly until finally they rescued her daughter and arrested the kidnappers. Then, when they were put on trial, she grew enraged again when one of them, a relative of a police official, managed to avoid the death penalty or even life in prison, the sentences meted out to his cohorts. He got 15 years, causing Tang to loudly protest again. After all, her daughter was at home, a mental cripple riven with venereal disease and physically damaged so she can never have children.

Well, local officials got tired of Tang’s constant complaining. So they charged her with “seriously disturbing social order and exerting a negative impact on society” and sentenced her to 18 months in her local re-education through labor center.

Another troublemaker silenced.

Word of this got out, of course. China is no longer the closed society it once was, though not because of anything the government did. No, social media has taken off with a ferocity that has no rival. Just one Twitter-like site, Sina Weibo, has 250 million subscribers. By contrast, Twitter (banned in China) has 500 million users worldwide.

Tang’s sentence set off a firestorm of angry messaging, so much of it that every attempt to censor the conversation failed. Users found ways around the blocked words or terms. And once the story surfaced, not even the most hard-line government official could stand up to defend the mother’s labor-camp sentence. So after just a week in the camp, early this month they let her go.

Explanations for this and similar cases vary. But Xinhua, the government news service, said the central government dispatched extra police around the country this summer to “ensure stability” by “settling disputes and resolving conflicts” ahead of the national leadership change this autumn.

But the way I see it, China is terrified of its own people ― afraid that one of these frequent online or street protests against errant criminal justice, environmental abuses or other travesties will one day blossom into a broad anti-government uprising, as has happened in so many other countries over the past 18 months.

Maybe the Communist Party leadership does hope to maintain a stable, harmonious society ahead of the leadership change. But by showing a willingness to relent, aren’t they also emboldening their people to stand up against them more frequently and forcefully? After all, Tang’s isn’t the only recent case.

Thousands of people protested the opening of a new paper factory in eastern China when they saw that it included a pipeline to dump tons of toxic waste into the ocean where village fishermen make their living. Pictures of the protests circulated on Weibo, and the government agreed to close the plant.

That came just a few weeks after citizens in a Sichuan Province town, angry about poisonous pollution from a proposed metal-alloy processing plant, angrily protested ― online and in person, once again. The government canceled the project.

But even more striking was the decision to arrest Li Xingong, a former senior party official, after an online uproar over accusations that he had raped several young girls. One Weibo user wrote: “Officials these days are all like this. It’s really terrible.”

Here again, once the allegations surfaced, party officials simply could not ignore them. But by striving to “maintain social harmony” now ― actually listening to the people and responding to their concerns ― Chinese leaders are encouraging their people to expect much more.

Xi Jinping, the presumed heir to the Communist Party “throne,” should certainly understand this. After all, when he was young, Mao Zedong purged and imprisoned Xi’s father, a once-trusted aide, for seeming to promote moderation.

When Xi takes office, he had better look around and realize that if he does not promote change, like his father, his own people could very well turn him out.

By Joel Brinkley

Joel Brinkley, a professor of journalism at Stanford University, is a Pulitzer Prize-winning former foreign correspondent for the New York Times. ― Ed.

(Tribune Media Services)