Comment: What are a few protesters to this regime?

Everyone has been desperate for a few TV pictures of shovel-faced repression, but until yesterday the Chinese authorities had been distressingly reluctant to oblige.

Not that there's any shortage of repression in China, of course. On Sunday, Hua Huiqi, a Beijing religious dissident, was detained merely for cycling towards a service at his officially authorised Christian church (the problem, perhaps, was that President Bush was also to be among the congregation that day).

Over the years, Hua has been repeatedly beaten and harassed. His 78-year-old mother is serving a two-year sentence for "damaging property" (hitting a car with her walking-stick).

In accordance with their promise to the IOC, the authorities have set aside three city parks as sites where political demonstrations are allowed.

Six days into the Games, not a single demonstration has occurred in any of them - and at least half-adozen Chinese who took the authorities at their word, and applied for permission to demonstrate, have instead found themselves locked up for "disturbing the social order".

Yet if there is no lack of repression, there is a distinct shortage of TV pictures. The cops have been playing it clever.

When some group of Western students unfurls a "Free Tibet" banner with the cameras in attendance, as they've done pretty much every day so far, they have not been clawed down and set upon, as they might have been at another time. They've been peacefully removed and quickly deported. No undue unpleasantness has intruded into "One World, One Dream".

Sometimes the cat-and-mouse game played by the international protesters, the international media and the police has been pure comedy.

Last week, another Western activist staged a pro-Tibet film screening in her city centre hotel room.

Alerted by the arrival of 30 people with cameras and notebooks at reception, the management called the authorities, the movie took a swift "wrap" and the hotel was officially closed down for "rebuilding".

Callers to the switchboard that day were told that it had not opened for business yet. "But there are guests staying there," protested one reporter. Ah yes, purred the manager.

"Those are friends of ours who are testing the facilities."

Beyond the frankly peripheral antics of the foreign protesters, the story is, as ever, complicated. China is not a straightforward, Saddam Hussein-style reign of terror.

You can easily find ordinary people and activists who are perfectly willing to criticise the regime in harsh terms. My own translator has repeatedly sued the authorities, albeit without success.

But political activists aside, most ordinary complainants are concerned with strictly local, individual issues, such as their houses being demolished. At least to begin with, not many make the connection between their individual troubles and their broader lack of political rights.

Indeed, many hold a touching belief that they do have rights and that if only the government knew what was happening to them, it would sort it out.

Chinese people never hear about the likes of Hua Huiqi. Many believe they are free, and discover the limits on their freedom only when they come up against them.

There is little broad pressure for democracy, and very little sympathy with Tibet.

A lot has been written about the heavy security here, and heavy it is. But the police are actually less edgy - and certainly less hung around with menacing implements - than they are in London.

Very few wear flak jackets or dangle long truncheons.

The Chinese police embody the demeanour of a regime totally confident in its power, knowing that it stands at the centre of an entire system of control. A few Western kids unfurling banners aren't going to change that.