Claims that China’s people exhibit a rising “rights consciousness” have proliferated in recent years, often accompanied by the assertion that this trend has the potential to lead to significant political change. Despite or perhaps because of the term’s wide use, rights consciousness suffers from a severe lack of conceptual clarity. To address this, we develop a choice-theoretic framework to examine what might be driving growth in rights conscious behavior, identifying three possibilities: changing values, changing government policy, and changing social equilibrium. While the most common conception of rights consciousness is as a value change, we find more evidence for the primacy of policy change, implying that the spread of rights consciousness is more stabilizing than destabilizing for the state. We also suggest that monitoring changes in social equilibrium is just as important as monitoring changing values when looking for signs of dramatic change in the political system.