Authoritarian states fear unarmed crowds

Governments built on tight political control tend to overreact early, because they cannot afford to wait.

- MAJ GEN R.P.S. BHADAURIA (RETD)

When small groups of people gather peacefully in China’s cities, the response from local authorities is swift and unambiguous. It often surprises observers who expect large numbers or confrontational slogans to trigger state action. Yet authoritarian systems do not view unarmed gatherings as harmless. They treat them as potential signals of something deeper: coordination, grievance and moral courage.

As someone who spent a career studying stability dynamics and civil-military behaviour, the pattern is familiar. Governments built on tight political control tend to overreact early, because they cannot afford to wait. Once a crowd grows, it gains visibility. Visibility creates momentum. Momentum leads to the one thing authoritarian systems cannot tolerate—a sense of shared purpose that arises outside official structures.

In democracies, security forces respond to disorder or violence. In authoritarian systems, the threshold is much lower. A handful of residents assembling on a street in Shanghai, or a cluster of workers raising concerns about local conditions, is seen as the earliest stage of disorder. The objective is not to manage protests; it is to ensure that protests never take shape.