“June 13, Monday, 94 incidents,” Lu Yuyu’s last tweet read on June 15. On June 24, the news spread that Lu Yuyu (卢昱宇) and his girlfriend Li Tingyu (李婷玉) were detained for “provoking disturbances.”…This is what Lu Yuyu and Li Tingyu have been doing for four years every day: researching, tallying, and publishing information about protests in China…

…Lu Yuyu…[identifies] the basic information about each incident through text and photos posted online. Then he searches other sources to verify the information…before posting it online…highlighting incidents involving more than 1,000 protesters…Lu Yuyu’s record-keeping is unique and irreplaceable…[T]he Chinese government stopped publishing statistics on “mass incidents” in 2008…

The most obvious change was after 2013, when the proportion of land dispute cases dropped and the number of labor disputes and urban protests increased. Labor rights protests often revolve around unpaid wages and social security issues, while urban resistance mostly related to “Not-In-My-Back-Yard” activism and other specific complaints — for instance, equal access to education…opposition to police violence, and so on…

Lu Yuyu summed it up…that, given the same protest, those in rural areas are more likely to be suppressed, while urbanites are more likely to be successful…Since 2015, Lu Yuyu found that the number of protests…shot up…In the first half of 2016 the number continued to climb, while the number of large protests involving 1,000 people or more reached about 40 per month…