Is an Egyptian style popular uprising likely in China?

             It is possible that we are going to see more of this in China

An Egyptian style popular uprising in China has so far failed to materialize. However, things could easily change. Max Fisher has written an interesting article about China´s dilemma in the latest issue of the Atlantic:

Despite their failures, democratic activists are still pressing, subtly subverting the state and spreading their message, and the Chinese government is taking them very seriously. International NGOs and journalists now say that the government crackdown is frighteningly reminiscent of 1989, which culminated with troops killing either hundreds or thousands of civilians at Tiananmen Square. As China increases its repressive measures, it may well quell the activists, but also risks upsetting, by its brutality, many of the urban Chinese who are otherwise indifferent.

China's dilemma is the same one experienced by autocratic regimes across the globe: a too-successful crackdown risks creating only more dissent, which will require even stronger crackdowns, initiating a violent cycle in which both the state and the population are neither willing nor able to back down. Such a cycle, if it continues unabated, has only two foreseeable endpoints: the collapse of the regime, which would be disastrous in a country as large, diverse, and militarized as China; or, more likely, the reversion of the state back to the violently repressive dictatorship of the 1970s. In other words, if the conflict between the state and its people continues to escalate, then the state is forced either to pursue the harshest possible campaign against it people, as it has in the past, or to abdicate.

This dark scenario may sound unlikely -- it's possible that the activists will simply give up, and the country's growing middle class will accept repression -- but, outside of the large coastal cities where Westerners travel, it is already underway. In the large, Northwestern province of Xinjiang, where reporters of any nationality are rarely allowed, the Chinese government has spent the last two years strangling basic civil rights and tightening markets. This process began after a spate of 2009 protests there, and has only increased since. A similar process has begun in Inner Mongolia, a province to the east, where security forces have waged a steady campaign of violence against dissenters.Read the entire article here

PS
I do not fully agree with Fisher, when he says that there are only two "foreseeable endpoints": the collapse of the regime, which would be disastrous in a country as large, diverse, and militarized as China; or, more likely, the reversion of the state back to the violently repressive dictatorship of the 1970s.
There is - at least in theory - a third option: A development in a more democratic direction could be introduced by a more enligthened communist leadership.