This research challenges the conventional wisdom that value-driven protests in China are exceedingly rare and face harsh state repression. Drawing on a hand-coded, multi-source dataset of over 3,100 protests in three Chinese megacities from 2014 to 2016, we identify 67 protests that reveal a hitherto unknown underbelly of everyday, value-driven contention. Qualitatively, we identify three main forms of contentious performances. Quantitatively, we show how value-driven protesters combine non-disruptive tactics with ambitious targets and virtually never extract concessions. Surprisingly, we find that such protests are less often policed and repressed than other protests. They are also never met with violence from non-state actors. We provide three interpretations for the counter-intuitive finding on repression. This study shows that the Chinese state coexists with a non-negligible amount of explicitly regime-critical contention. It adopts a containment strategy, tolerating a certain extent of value-driven performances when the risk of spill-over into wider society is limited.

Employing the concept of “contingent attachment” as its key point, this paper investigates the transformation of residents’ neighbourhood attachment during the redevelopment of a neighbourhood originally established during the Third Front construction period. By framing neighbourhood attachment as contingent, this paper seeks to highlight that the different directions of neighbourhood attachment hinge upon several factors: the entities mobilizing the narrative, the varying treatment of residents across different phases of the relocation, and residents’ perceptions regarding the changes brought about by the relocation process. Special attention within this paper is paid towards the long-term lived experiences of residents since the onset of the Third Front construction to show how these experiences are woven into diverse narratives associated with residents’ neighbourhood attachments.