'Although the Chinese government no longer publishes comprehensive statistics on the number of mass incidents in the country each year, based on the partial data available, it has been estimated that there were some 90,000 mass incidents throughout China in 2009, the vast majority of which were triggered by specific rights violations. It is further estimated that around one third of those protests were labour-related. This would put the number of strikes and collective worker protests in 2009 at around 30,000.'
'China's labour dispute mediation and arbitration institutions took on 1,287,400 cases in 2010, an increase of 3.85 percent from the previous year. A total of 1,264,100 cases were concluded in 2010, among them, 879,200 or 69.55 percent being resolved through mediation.'
'The number of collective labour disputes dropped significantly in 2010 but this was due entirely to the widespread practice of dividing collective cases up into individual ones, and handling each individual complainant's issue separately. The number of collective cases reported in 2010 totalled 9, 314, involving 211,800 workers, a decrease of 32.4 percent and 29.3 percent respectively from the previous year. Moreover, nearly all of those collective disputes that eventually developed into strikes and public protests were dealt with by local government --emergency-coping mechanisms and as such were kept off the books. Despite the statistical decrease, it seems that collective disputes remain at a high level and are perhaps even increasing in frequency as more and more workers realise they have strength in numbers and that the complaints filed by one worker, in fact, are shared by hundreds, even thousands of others.'