Focusing on slogans from environmental and land requisition protests (i.e., the two most typical massive incidents), the current study attempts to explore the discourse system and discourse logic of China’s social contention from a broad cultural background. Based on a meta-analysis of 143 slogans from 15 environmental protests and 7 land requisition protests, it concludes that actors rooted in China’s traditional cultures would employ “family/self” as the starting point, and follow the hierarchical order which built by the two dimensions of “time vs. space” and “us vs. them” to construct discourses, and expand them gradually from interior to exterior and from self to others, so as to transform the individual contention of a small group to a collective mission of all citizens and fulfill the tasks of consensus mobilization, action mobilization, and social mobilization. At the same time, actors also follow the logic of walking strategically across the discourse boundaries of exit, shadow, voice and loyalty. As there’s no way to exit, people must stand out from the shadow and make collective voice as well as “loyalopposition”. Such a dynamically balancing process results in the extraordinary rich and diversified contentious discourses in China.