The key question is how much support or tolerance the regime continues to enjoy. Whether in the Middle East or China, Westerners too easily see the Facebook generation as the voice of the immediate future; doubtful, it seems to me, in both cases. Our gullibility on China was neatly illustrated a few years back when a best-selling Chinese novel, Wolf Totem by Jiang Rong, was reviewed in Britain as if it were a heartfelt plea for the environment; in fact it was a startlingly nationalistic tract, calling for a less sheep-like and more wolfishly assertive China. Nor are Chinese Christians, however numerous (and there are now as many as Communist Party members), or the Taoist/Buddhist Falun Gong a reliable indicator of what's happening. Underneath it all nationalistic sentiment is growing in tandem with national success, in the way you would expect in a vibrantly renascent power.

The average Chinese will not have heard of Ai Weiwei, and is unlikely to be fired up by sub-Duchampian games, however heartfelt the political message, or by denunciations of their government by celebrity dissidents. If they are told he is a well-to-do urban tax-evader, sometime foreign resident and practitioner of an art form they do not understand, which he uses to slander the Motherland, they will know what they think. For them a full belly, a flat, four wheels instead of two, and a fierce new pride trump any amount of artistic self-expression. "In China human rights means having gas for your car," was one minister's version.

It follows, of course, that should there be a serious slippage in the rate of material advance, alongside continued scandals involving Communist Party corruption, land-grabbing and the rest, the anarchic embers in Chinese history could reignite and bring populace and intellectuals together. The recent upsurge in incidents resulting from strikes and police brutality notwithstanding, at present that seems unlikely.

It is not just the size but the quality of the protest movement that matters. Dissidence in China has a mixed record, and it is no reflection on their courage or sufferings to say that people of the stature of Sakharov, or in literature the poet Joseph Brodsky, are still awaited, though the astrophysicist Fang Lizti, now in the US has a fine record. The father of modern Chinese dissidents is Wei Jingsheng, formerly an electrician, who in 1978 put up illicit posters in Beijing. "Democracy Wall" was born — and within a few weeks obliterated. Wei was condemned to 15 years in prison and in labour camps, a terrifying experience during which he was tortured and lost all his teeth. An international outcry obliged the Chinese government to expel him to America in 1997. Later Wei insisted the Chinese people do want democracy, rather than some softened form of party dictatorship. Then he claimed that China needed no centralised authority at all.

Another prominent exile was the self-described commandant of the Tiananmen uprising, Wuer Kaixi, who moved to Taiwan. In allowing dissidents to emigrate, the CCP calculated that they would not be unified enough to establish a movement in exile, and they were right. They retain influence, but their revolt was over a quarter of a century ago, its leaders have been scattered, conditions in China have improved vastly, and Wuer Kaixi has been honest about the effects of exile: "In China we were ignorant of what individualism, love and consumerism were. Everything was communal and political. In the West we discovered all that."