Since the beginning of the new century, the incidence of collective protests by rural collectives has always been high due to the historical legacy of land expropriation in the Pearl River Delta. On the surface, many land expropriation cases have problems such as nonstandardized procedures, low compensation standards, insufficient compensation funds, and corruption by rural cadres. However, a deeper look behind the scenes of these land expropriation cases reveals that these collective protests for land expropriation have hidden causes, more complex structures, and different mechanisms. Different from rural resistance to government infringement in the general sense, the collective resistance of rural residents in the Pearl River Delta region showed clear characteristics of a game over interests. Moreover, these rural collective protests are often linked to “structural-institutional” factors such as clan and land shareholding arrangements in the villages. Therefore, a careful dissection of these cases of rural collective protest will not only help to clarify the internal mechanisms but is also significant for us to deepen our understanding of rural protest behavior and to innovate the theoretical perspective of the study of rural resistance.