Those promises turned out to be hollow. The protest zones stayed empty (those who applied for permission to protest were detained) and only foreign reporters working at the Olympic Village enjoyed unfettered access to the web.

Looking back, the Olympics were the beginning of a new era for China: that of an increasingly powerful and self-confident nation but one whose leaders fear their own citizens and one that has committed itself to constraining their thoughts and aspirations.

Instead of revolutionizing society, the web has become a sophisticated tool for contorting the minds of China’s 650 million Internet users. Within months of the Olympics closing ceremony, the government moved to block Facebook, Twitter and YouTube; before long, the list of banned websites would grow to include The New York Times, Bloomberg, Instagram, Dropbox and Google’s services.

In their place, Beijing has promoted domestic offerings like Sina Weibo, a Twitter-like service, the messaging app WeChat and news portals like Sohu — all of them strictly policed for content deemed threatening to the party’s hold on power. Try typing in “Tiananmen Square massacre” and the dominant Chinese search engine Baidu will spit back a screen announcing that the results “are not available according to certain laws and policies.”

The impact of this online manipulation has been sobering. Most young Chinese cannot identify the iconic photo of the lone protester who stood in front of a tank that spring in 1989, and last year, when thousands of students took to the streets of Hong Kong demanding democracy, otherwise sensible friends could only parrot back the state media’s talking points: that the protesters were spoiled hooligans who had been manipulated by “hostile foreign forces.”

It’s true that China is far more open than it was 25 years ago. Chinese are traveling and studying abroad in ever greater numbers, and loosened social controls mean that Chinese and foreigners can mix without interference from the authorities. Despite the government’s best efforts, millions manage to circumvent online censorship by using VPN software.

But the party has nearly perfected the art of control, giving Chinese society a heady dynamism that often obscures the government’s far-reaching limits on dissent. These days, official slogans trumpet such ideals as “democracy” and “justice” but citizens are jailed for advocating free elections or for suing the government over polluting factories.