Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a Chinese, I would say the Chinese government is worried about 'Arab Spring', but that's not why they attacked NYT this time. The 'Great firewall' was built to prevent any uprising similar to 'Arab spring' from being started.
How likely do you think a Chinese spring would be? It's unfortunate that we don't get more foreign perspective on HN and Reddit - I hope you comment more.
Also I'd like to challenge the implied perspective that somehow American democracy is somehow superior. In fact the very notion of fighting for a political cause is a Western idea, Chinese people are less naive than Americans in a sense because everyone in China knows that the nightly newscast (Xinwen Lianbo) is all BS whereas people in America listen and cling onto their political religion (Rachael Maddow/Amy Goodman/Colbert Report for Left Coast Yuppies, Glenn Beck for Tea Partiers and CNN for mainstream suburbanites).
The Chinese idea is that politics has really less to do with personal life as they are the waves of a ocean to a surfer; they come and go, rather than try to bend the all-powerful, insurmountable, it's best to yield to the ocean, surf in its direction. People humbly refer themselves as One of the Hundred Names (Lao Bai Xin), separate from the emperors or now CPC in their celestial palace.
Not fighting for one's identity and civil representation may seem apathetic and offensive to American sensibilities. But for the Chinese, one would rather improve one's lot by focusing on getting into a better school, a good employer and finding a good partner for marriage and taking care parents than getting a piece of legislation changed advertising that you could potentially live a better life.
I'm sure supporters of American-style democracy will point to the civil rights movement, the New Deal, child labor laws as democracy-in-action that changed working class people's lives for the better if people stick together and march onto Washington. But the Chinese perspective sees revolutions and protests as natural occurrences of the masses dissatisfaction, like waves in an ocean, they will form when the conditions are right (mass protests on polluting factories, mass Weibo posts on air quality and expose on certain official's corruption). Even Tianmen incident was a protest made by the falling dominoes of communism and a mass of disaffected students and workers with varying and complex mix of agenda's - and to compare with the Westerner's idea of a rallying cry (Sandy Hook, Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, Rosa Parks) with a singular hero or matyr, it's a contrast of Taoist Wu-Wei and Confucian idea of communal harmony to American individualism and manifest destiny.