In theory, the Communist Party allows citizens to lobby the central government on matters of local corruption, the illegal seizure of land and extralegal detentions. In reality, those who arrive at Beijing’s petition office are often met at the door by plainclothes officers who stop them from filing their complaints and then bundle them back to their hometowns. Intimidation, beatings and administrative detentions are often enough to prevent them from trying again.

Daniel A. Bell, who teaches political theory at Tsinghua University in Beijing, suggested that Western political leaders and rights advocates were naïve to think that the Olympics would lead to looser restrictions. Although Chinese have come to enjoy greater freedoms in the past two decades, progress has been largely stalled in the years leading up to the Olympics as officials worked to ensure that nothing would interfere with them.

In recent months, the pressure has only intensified: scores of rights lawyers and political dissenters have been detained, and even the armies of migrant workers who built the Olympic stadiums have been encouraged to leave town, lest their disheveled appearances detract from the image of a clean, modern nation.

“When you have guests coming over for dinner, you clean up the house and tell the children not to argue,” Mr. Bell said.

While the demands of Ms. Wu, 79, and Ms. Wang, 77, the protest applicants, might be seen as harmless, they threatened to expose the systemic problems that bedevil the lives of millions of Chinese. Like many disenchanted citizens, the two women, former neighbors, were seeking to draw attention to a government-backed real estate deal that promised to give them apartments in the new development that replaced their homes not far from Tiananmen Square. Six years later, they are living in ramshackle apartments on the outskirts of the city, and their demands for compensation have gone unanswered.

On Monday, when they returned to the police station to follow up on their protest applications, the women were told they had been sentenced to one year at a labor camp for “disturbing public order.” For the moment, the women have been allowed to return to their homes, but they have been warned that they could be sent to a detention center at any moment, relatives said.

Officials say that they received 77 protest applications but that nearly all of them were dropped after the complaints were “properly addressed by relevant authorities or departments through consultations.”