The headline in the China Daily on Tuesday said it all. Before the Olympics, Beijing announced that three sites in the city's parks would be allocated for protests. There was the small matter that you had to apply in advance and get approval, but that should have been routine.

Then the headline “77 applications, no protests at Beijing Games”.

The municipal security bureau said that 74 applications had been “withdrawn after amicable settlements”. Two were suspended for “procedural reasons”, and one turned down because it involved children - illegal because they “do not have independence of will”.

The security bureau clearly saw this as a success, as maintaining security in the Olympics is a prime concern of the authorities, with measures ranging from curfews to shipping out ethnic minorities. Order is the watchword, in keeping with the emphasis on “stability” that the Communist Party insists it, alone, can provide for the nation.

The Games are certainly a celebration of what the official Xinhua news agency calls China's renaissance. But any spontaneous upset in proceedings must be avoided, hence the visual tricks and lip-synching in the opening ceremony, the blocking of provincial petitioners from Beijing and the “amicable” withdrawal of almost all protest applications. To ensure control, Xi Jinping, the man most likely to lead the Communist Party after 2012, is the Games supremo.

All this points up an essential difference between the Western mindset and those heading the last major communist state on Earth. The Chinese leadership's attachment to micromanaged control can be traced back more than 2,000 years to the First Emperor of 221BC. Self-confident in its own civilisation, China did not have an Enlightenment, and Mao donned the Mandate of Heaven (Marxist-style) as the founder of a new dynasty in 1949.

The top-down approach is not always successful; in some ways, today's China is beyond control as its economy defies direction from the centre. But the fundamental difference in approach should be kept firmly in mind by those dealing with the nascent superpower.

The Chinese are a lot freer than they were under Mao, but the men in charge do not brook dissent. Economic liberalisation has not had its parallel in the political sphere. The regime and its obsession with control will long outlive the Olympics. The world must get used to that. Only when China gets its Screaming Lord Sutch will the long authoritarian heritage have crumbled.

Jonathan Fenby is author of The Penguin History of Modern China

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