Xie Jia believes she has just won a small but important victory for democracy. The 41-year-old chemistry teacher from the central city of Chongqing is head of a committee of local homeowners who recently staged a meticulously organised series of elections, and ultimately voted out the management company in their compound.

So fraught was the process that one neighbour had a finger bitten off. But Ms Xie is upbeat. “We had a few problems along the way, but this is a building block towards a greater level of democracy.”

This exercise in civic activism is not quite on the scale envisaged by Chinese bloggers inspired by the crowds demanding their freedom in the Middle East. Indeed, 22 years after students flocked to Tiananmen Square, online calls for a homegrown Jasmine revolution have gone largely unanswered, though they have produced a thuggish response from local security officials. The country lacks a large constituency of disaffected, Facebook-friendly twentysomethings hankering for regime change.