How does recurring social unrest influence political selection within China’s authoritarian regime? While past research has highlighted the role of loyalty and economic performance in career advancement, the influence of social unrest remains largely unexplored. Drawing on two original datasets of 130,279 protest events and 55,069 career trajectory records of prefectural leaders from 2012 to 2022, the talk highlights how cumulative microprotests serve as important signals of governance failures and increase the risk of career termination for local leaders. Specifically, survival analyses reveal that each additional protest per month increases the hazard of career termination for local leaders by approximately 3%, with small-scale protests exerting a greater cumulative impact than large-scale protests. These findings challenge the widely held assumption that protests are treated as automatic “veto items,” instead showing that the regime leverages recurring protest events as negative feedback to adjust political selection decisions.