Abstract: Specialists in China frequently interpreted political resilience of Chinese authoritarianism from the perspective of institutionalization, yet were never concerned with the impact of social protest on the authoritarian rule. What this paper tries to do is to account for, in the context of market-oriented reform, why authoritarian resilience of China has not been reduced but strengthened. Due to the fact that China, like other authoritarian regimes, always has certain flaws, such as the lack of equitable redistribution or ineffective control over grassroots cadres, rulers often face strong discontents from below and political threats generated from the discontents. The role of social protest is to signal political crisis to rulers and by such a signal the rulers adapt to better policies and punish the corrupt or incompetent cadres so that the discontents are alleviated. In the past three decades, the attitudes of major protest groups in China (farmers, migrate farm workers and the laid-off workers in cities) toward the government have shifted from being discontent to giving the government more trust. In China, social protests with low-level mobilization actually facilitate the authoritarian rule, provided that the following preconditions are met: the state has sufficient economic resources; and it can effectively control the cadres in grassroots communities.