The current setup fosters allegiance to the party, even if it is based on the survival instinct and not a small dollop of greed. Li Fan, director of the World and China Institute, a nongovernmental group in Beijing that studies political reform, said electoral democracy would threaten the benefits entrepreneurial elites enjoy under the current system. “Those who have prospered from economic reform have no interest in sharing power or the spoils of prosperity with those beneath them,” he said.

The same can be said of the 300 million members of China’s growing middle class, many of whom subscribe to the belief that universal suffrage would overempower their impoverished rural brethren. It has become an article of faith, even among idealistic college students, that Chinese peasants are too unschooled to intelligently select the nation’s leaders. As Jiang Zemin, then the Chinese president, told Mike Wallace in a 2000 interview, “The quality of our people is too low.”

The demonization of democracy emanates from top leaders like Wu Bangguo, the party’s top legislator, who last month warned the nation that electoral democracy would drive China “into the abyss of internal disorder.” Chiming in are celebrities like Jackie Chan, the Hong Kong actor who has denounced democratic societies like Taiwan as “chaotic,” saying the Chinese require authoritarian governance. “If we’re not being controlled, we’ll just do what we want,” he said at a gathering of Chinese executives two years ago, prompting a round of hearty applause.

Although most upwardly mobile Chinese are not eager to talk about it, there is another compelling disincentive against agitating for the kind of Western-style democracy they admit to admiring so much — when it is practiced in places like the United States. Liu Xiaobo, the last Chinese citizen of note to call for an end to single-party rule, found himself in jail for 11 years on charges of subversion. Even his Nobel Peace Prize, awarded last October, did nothing to ease his predicament, nor has it sapped the government’s zeal for repression: In recent weeks, more than four dozen public intellectuals, rights lawyers and bloggers have been detained or “disappeared” by the authorities as part of an ominous new campaign against dissent.

“It is true that people have seen a significant improvement in living standards and they are optimistic about the future,” said Joseph Cheng, a professor of political science at City University of Hong Kong. “But they also know there is nothing to be gained by sticking their neck out.”