Abbreviated version of Premier Wen's speech at Cambridge University

This week I was sitting in the audience directly in front of the Chinese Prime Minister when a large grey trainer whizzed out of the crowded auditorium behind me, missed Wen Jiabao by a few feet and thudded on to the stage.

Mr Wen's lecture at Cambridge University came to an abrupt halt. The lone protester was hustled, shouting and shoeless, out of the lecture hall and into the waiting arms of the Cambridge police. A Chinese security guard retrieved the offending shoe, and hid it under his coat.

Flying footwear has suddenly become the world's favourite protest statement. The trend began in December, when an Iraqi journalist hurled both his shoes and a torrent of abuse at George W. Bush during his last Baghdad press conference.

Shoe throwing has since become a globalised phenomenon. (“Bootslapping (future verb): to express political displeasure by throwing footwear.”) The antiwar group Code Pink pelted a Bush effigy with shoes outside the White House. A Ukrainian protester tossed his loafers at a politician, declaring that the “shoe is going to become an important means for ordinary people to influence their leaders”.

Cleverly putting the boot on the other foot, Luiz da Silva, the President of Brazil, threatened to throw his shoes at unfriendly journalists while attending a shoe festival in São Paulo last month.

In the future of political protest the shoes will continue to fly, but with varying significance. In Arab culture, hitting someone with a shoe is an extreme form of insult. Throwing a shoe at the Chinese Prime Minister in China would be an act of suicidal bravery. The same act in a Cambridge lecture hall required little courage: merely a good throwing arm, a reasonable aim and a desire to be noticed.

Shoe hurling may be hugely symbolic or plain silly, but its significance lies less in the intentions of the thrower than the reaction to it. How a state and society respond to this sort of deliberately offensive act says an enormous amount about a country, its notions of individual freedom, justice and sense of humour.

Gandhi would never have lobbed his sandals to make a point, but shoe throwing is hardly the most violent form of protest either, which is what makes it a strange sort of political litmus. A country's very soul may be reflected in its response to a smelly insole chucked at an important person: this is the “the shoe test”.

Muntazer al-Zaidi, the journalist who hurled his shoes at the American President's head with the words “This is a farewell kiss from the Iraqi people, you dog”, was immediately seized by bodyguards and dragged away. He was then allegedly tortured during his initial interrogation and pressured to “confess” that he had been put up to the plot by some shadowy Shia shoe-mastermind.

Al-Zaidi and his shoes became instant heroes to many Arabs. A Saudi businessman bid $10,000 for the pair. The Turkish company that manufactures them, Baydan, has seen its sales rocket. Al-Zaidi has been offered a 20-year-old bride, a six-door Mercedes, a job on Lebanese television and a home in Venezuela. A copper statue of the shoe, three metres long, was erected in Tikrit.

Two months later al-Zaidi remains in prison, facing a sentence of up to 15 years. He is said to be seeking political asylum in Switzerland.

As granite-faced Chinese security guards surrounded Mr Wen on Monday afternoon, and the protester was removed, I found myself wondering what would have happened to the man had he been Chinese, and had his shoe-throwing stunt taken place in Beijing. The incident would have been erased and so, in all probability, would he.

Twenty years after the Tiananmen Square protests, we still do not know the identity or fate of the young man who stood in the path of the oncoming tanks. The Chinese Government has never produced Tank Man, who was probably executed. Yet China is changing, and there are even signs of this in the reaction to Monday's shoe throwing. Initially, the incident was hushed up in China, but by Tuesday night state television had aired the full footage of the Chinese Premier having a grubby trainer flung at him.

Perhaps the Chinese authorities had concluded that the image of their leader standing his ground in the face of flagrant footwear aggression was quite positive; more likely, they realised that suppressing the news was impossible and counterproductive. China voiced official displeasure at the incident, but declined to put the boot in.

The most impressive aspect of the British reaction was that there wasn't one. The entire episode was treated with a shrug and a wry grin. “Flew Man's Shoe” declared the Sun headline. The shoe thrower was neither brutalised nor elevated into a martyr. No one has offered him a bride or a statue.

The response was splendidly understated: “This university is a place for considered argument and debate, not for shoe throwing,” said the Vice-Chancellor. As a motto for a great seat of learning, one could not do better: come to Cambridge, and learn to keep your shoes on.

This is the civilised, measured approach to protest, even protest that involves flinging shoes around and insulting foreign dignitaries. Mr Bush, oddly, put it best, after ducking two size-ten missiles hurled by an angry Iraqi in his socks: “It's a way to draw attention... I believe that a free society is emerging.”

As for the Cambridge shoe protester, he was charged with a public order offence, released and will appear in court next week. He has vanished into anonymous obscurity as securely and permanently as Tank Man, but for entirely contrasting reasons. That may make him rather cross, but it ought to make us proud.

As Donald Rumsfeld might have put it: freedom's untidy. Free people are free to do bad things. Shoes happen.

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