The government may respond to collective resistance with any modes of repression, tolerance or concession when the collective resistance occurs. It is the feature of Chinese central-local relations that local government is generally responsible for dealing with many collective resistances. Since the central government stressed importance to the maintenance of social stability, local cadre’s promotion chances have been affected by the frequency of collective resistance directly. The question is how does government choose their response in dealing with collective resistance. Using the multinomial logistic regression, this article shows that whether collective resistance’s requirement threats the regime or not is the most significant factor for the government to choose repression. In addition ethnic minorities’participation is key factor especially when the government uses repression, because most requirement from the ethnic minorities the political system. The government strongly deals with the participants when the collective resistance’s requirement threats the regime, while they ignore it when the collective resistance’s requirement is not related to political system. However most of collective resistance doesn’t threaten the regime, so central government basically doesn’t get involved, local government deals with them individually. Therefore In China, local governments assume considerable autonomy in dealing with collective resistance, we need to focus attention on the local leader’s way of thinking, both scale and attention from the foreign media are also crucial for government to choose the mode of response.