For almost a decade, “weiwen,” or “maintaining social stability,” has been the government’s public mantra[...]“Stability” has been deemed more important than education, health care and even national defense.
Political and social fixity (to use an obnoxious historian term) has been one of the overriding goals of the dominant Chinese polity since before the Great Wall was built. It's something that Westerners have a lot of trouble understanding -- Communism might be a fairly recent addition to China, but the value the Chinese place on stability is a tradition that dates so far back we have trouble measuring its age.