CHINA FACES GROWING INTERNAL PRESSURE / GEOPOLITICAL FUTURES

China Faces Growing Internal Pressure

Slower growth, persistent unrest and regional disparity are among the top challenges constraining decision-making in Beijing today.

By: Geopolitical Futures

By Dr. Lamont Colucci

U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are expected to meet in person later this spring, after a brief delay tied in part to the conflict in Iran. 

Such summits are often seen as signals of great-power competition, but they tend to obscure a more important reality: A state’s actions are determined not only by its strengths but also by its constraints. 

In China’s case, those constraints are increasingly domestic.

For decades, China’s rise has been understood primarily in terms of capability – economic expansion, industrial capacity, military modernization and global reach.

This perception is still valid but incomplete. 

Power is the ability to use resources under pressure. 

In China’s case, pressure is no longer confined to the external environment.

China’s current position reflects the success of a system built on investment-driven growth, export integration and centralized political control – what Beijing describes as “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” 

While this system generated extraordinary expansion and lifted hundreds of millions out of poverty, it also rested on an implicit understanding that sustained economic advancement would compensate for the political constraints imposed on the population – an extension of Beijing’s earlier promise of the “iron rice bowl.”

This understanding hasn’t disappeared, but it has weakened. 

Growth has slowed, mobility has narrowed and the mechanisms that once absorbed tension now transmit it. 

The question is no longer whether China faces internal pressures but whether those pressures have become central to how the state defines and manages its own security.

Limits of the Growth Model

China’s most immediate strain lies in its economic foundation. 

For decades, growth depended on infrastructure investment, real estate expansion and export manufacturing. 

This model helped scale Chinese growth, but it also created dependency.

The property sector illustrates the problem. 

Once a primary driver of growth and household wealth, it now faces prolonged decline, with falling prices, excess supply and unfinished developments. 

It has also been marked by well-documented cases of substandard (or “tofu-dreg”) construction, reflecting deeper issues of corruption and lack of oversight. 

Because real estate is tied to local government revenues and financial exposure, its weakness reverberates across the system.

Local governments are particularly exposed. 

Many financed development through land sales and off-balance-sheet borrowing. 

As property markets weakened, revenues declined but debt obligations remained. 

The response has often been extraction fees, delayed payments and, most significantly, land conversion. 

This dynamic links directly to social instability. 

Land seizures and redevelopment have become recurring triggers for rural protest, tying fiscal strain to local confrontation. 

Economic slowdown is not simply a matter of slower growth. It alters how the state is experienced at the local level.

The financial system reflects a similar pattern of managed stress. 

Official indicators suggest stability, but external estimates point to significantly higher levels of impaired assets. 

Rather than allowing failures to cascade, authorities have relied on consolidation and restructuring, quietly merging or absorbing weaker institutions to prevent localized crises. 

Thousands of smaller financial entities have been folded into larger ones, preserving stability while masking underlying fragility.

These pressures are closely tied to local government solvency. 

As land sales – once a major revenue source – decline, fiscal gaps widen. 

The result is a system in which property weakness, financial strain and local government debt reinforce one another, requiring continuous intervention rather than self-correction. 

Meanwhile, weak domestic demand remains a constraint. 

Deflationary pressures have compressed margins and wages, while recent price increases have been driven more by external costs than internal recovery. 

The system therefore remains dependent on external demand and state direction, rather than domestic consumption.

Erosion of Expectations

China’s stability has long rested on rising expectations, but that foundation is now shifting. 

Youth unemployment remains elevated, and confidence among younger generations has weakened. 

Behavioral responses – withdrawal from competitive work, reduced consumption and declining optimism – have become more visible, signaling a change in expectations.

Protest activity has also increased. 

Independent monitoring projects, which provide a partial but useful measure of scale, recorded more than 5,000 dissent events in 2025 alone, bringing the total observed incidents to more than 14,000 since 2022. 

These figures likely undercount the true level of unrest, but they reveal a clear pattern. 

The majority of demonstrations are driven by economic grievances – labor disputes, housing-related issues and land seizures – rather than political demands. 

Workers and property owners account for a significant share of the participants, but rural protests have also increased as local governments rely more heavily on land extraction.

This rural unrest is particularly significant. 

As fiscal pressures intensify, local authorities have fewer options, leading to increased reliance on land conversion and other extractive practices. 

This has led to more frequent confrontations between villagers and local officials. 

The encounters are typically contained quickly, but their persistence reflects underlying strain.

Chinese instability is defined not by large-scale rebellion but by continuous, low-intensity friction between society and the state. 

In China, the character of the unrest is as important as its scale. 

Most protests are small, localized and short-lived. 

Participants are typically unarmed, and demonstrations are limited in scope. 

Violence at the protest level remains relatively low. 

When force is involved, it is usually applied by the state. 

Local police respond quickly, and escalation is tightly controlled. 

Only a minority of protests require stronger intervention, though in many cases some form of repression – detentions, force or surveillance – follows.

This produces a distinctive equilibrium: Unrest is frequent but contained. 

It is managed rather than allowed to escalate. 

The risk lies in accumulation. 

Thousands of incidents across a vast country require continuous management. 

Stability must be actively maintained.

At the center of this dynamic is China’s floating population – the hundreds of millions of migrant workers who move between rural and urban areas. 

They have been essential to China’s growth model, supplying labor to the construction, manufacturing and services sectors. 

Yet they remain structurally insecure, lacking full access to urban benefits. 

Moreover, the composition of this population has shifted. 

Once dominated by younger, unmarried men, it now increasingly includes women, families and older workers, reflecting bigger structural changes in the labor market.

As growth slows, this population becomes a transmission mechanism for instability. 

Weak construction demand and slower job creation push migrant workers out of cities and back into rural areas, where opportunities are limited. 

This movement carries economic stress across regions, linking urban slowdown to rural dissatisfaction. 

The floating population connects different parts of the system in ways that amplify pressure.

Control Pattern

China’s response to domestic pressure reveals how the leadership understands the problem. 

The People’s Armed Police functions as a reserve force for internal stability, designed to respond when unrest exceeds the capacity of regular policing. 

Alongside it, the Ministry of State Security operates as a broader instrument of surveillance and preemption, extending into ideological control and information management.

Under President Xi Jinping, these roles have expanded within a broader conception of national security that encompasses economic, social and political domains. 

Governance itself has become securitized, and internal pressure is treated as an interconnected system of risk requiring coordinated control.

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated these trends. 

It intensified fiscal strain and exposed citizens to unprecedented levels of state intervention. 

Lockdowns demonstrated the state’s capacity for control but also revealed its limits. 

Public frustration highlighted underlying tensions, even as most protests remained localized. 

More importantly, the experience reinforced a governance model based on centralized authority and rapid mobilization. 

COVID-19 normalized emergency governance, strengthening state capacity while increasing the burden of maintaining legitimacy under slower growth.

The need for control extends beyond society into elite institutions. 

The removal of senior military officers in recent years reflects ongoing efforts to enforce discipline and ensure reliability. 

While presented as anti-corruption measures, these actions reinforce political control over critical institutions.

For the leadership, the integrity of the armed forces is inseparable from regime security. 

Economic management, internal security and military organization all reflect a central priority: maintaining control amid increasing complexity.

External Factors

These internal pressures shape China’s external behavior in significant ways. 

Economic constraints reinforce the need for external markets. 

Industrial overcapacity drives exports, while weak domestic demand limits alternatives.

These dynamics are particularly relevant in the context of trade tensions with the United States. 

Tariffs imposed by Washington increase pressure on an economy already facing weak demand, industrial overcapacity and financial strain. 

At the same time, Beijing’s ability to offer concessions is constrained by the need to maintain internal stability, protect key sectors and manage employment. 

Trade policy becomes an extension of domestic economic management.

China’s position in the Iran conflict adds another layer of complexity. 

Its reliance on Middle Eastern energy flows, including from Iran, and its exposure to potential secondary sanctions increase its sensitivity to external shocks. 

The delay of the Trump-Xi summit itself underscores how external crises and domestic pressures work together to shape diplomatic timing and negotiating space.

None of this diminishes China’s capacity to challenge the existing international order. 

Its military modernization, industrial scale and technological ambitions – particularly in the Western Pacific and in emerging domains such as space – continue to expand its reach. 

Internal constraint does not eliminate competition; it shapes it. 

Under pressure, China may act with greater caution in some areas, but it will also display increased urgency, even bellicosity, in others – particularly on issues such as Taiwan, where core interests and perceptions of strategic position converge. 

Centralization further influences decision-making, increasing coherence while reducing flexibility.

A System Under Pressure

None of these challenges is unprecedented on its own. 

China has managed economic shifts, social unrest and institutional reform before. 

What is distinctive is the convergence of challenges – financial strain, slower growth, persistent unrest and regional disparity, an issue long recognized in Chinese strategy, including Mao Zedong’s warnings about overconcentration of development along the coast at the expense of the interior.

These pressures interact. Economic stress fuels dissatisfaction. 

Dissatisfaction requires control. Control affects flexibility. 

And each of these factors reinforces the others. 

This does not signal an imminent crisis. 

China retains substantial capacity and resilience. 

But its leadership operates under tighter constraints than in the past.

For much of the reform era, China’s stability rested on rising expectations. 

That model has evolved. 

Growth alone no longer absorbs tension. Stability must now be managed more directly. 

These constraints do not reduce China’s significance as a strategic competitor. 

They define the conditions under which that competition will unfold.

China remains a powerful state, but its power is shaped by the conditions it must manage internally. 

For observers, the central question is not simply what China seeks to do abroad but what it can do while maintaining stability at home. 

In that sense, China’s domestic condition is not separate from its national security but rather a defining element of it.

Dr. Lamont Colucci was the inaugural director of doctrine development for the U.S. Space Force and is a professor of political science at Concordia University Wisconsin. 

A former U.S. State Department diplomat, he specializes in national security, foreign policy and space strategy. 

He is the author of multiple books on American grand strategy.