Culturally, the Chinese population has more of a rebellious streak than people realize. It's a weird contrast - the Great Firewall is there but citizens and often the workers that maintain the firewall seem to circumvent it on a regular basis. Often in order just to function day to day and survive, as noted above.

Also an analogy re how the image is of communist central planning, but post Deng, it's maybe even more of a freewheeling capitalist economy in some regions than the US....(especially in Shenzhen - see Bunnie Huang's write-ups of the ecosystem/economies there)