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Prior studies regard responsiveness as an effective institution for Chinese government to mitigate social protests based on the premise that citizens adopt more institutionalized channels as soon as the regime makes it available. We challenge this notion by arguing that institutionalized and noninstitutionalized channels are not substituting but complements, and improving responsiveness to institutionalized participation may ironically lead to more protests. We collected a unique dataset and employed machine-learning to measure the quality of local responsiveness. We find that improving responsiveness has a positive effect on protests and identify updating citizens' beliefs on repression as major mechanism. The findings suggest the availability of new institutionalized channels may not have the intended substitutive effects on noninstitutionalized participation, and thus authoritarian co-optation could have unintended consequences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]