Abstract: Under the rule of the Chinese Communist Party, both policy cycle and protest cycle oscillate with a ten-year term. This paper addresses the following questions: first, why do the two cycles occur in the same time? Seocnd, why does the protest cycle last either longer or shorter than ten years? The first question is presumed to relate to the “guerrilla decision style,” characterized by radical, inconsistent, and self-denial reasoning and acts. This style of decision dominates the direction and the trajectory of collective protests. A couple of variables, “intra-party struggle for leadership” and “the extent of the state’s penetration into society”, can be helpful to explain the variety of changes of the cycles. Whether strong or weak, they all decide how long the inter-oscillation of the cycles will last.