Is China opening up or cracking down, and does anyone there care?

Plenty of people in China are keen to tell foreigners their country is opening up to allow more dissent on political issues than ever before - pointing to numerous reports of corruption in newspapers and magazines that have not only been allowed past the censor, but led to the dismissal of officials, and reporting on environmental issues that has allowed ordinary people to find out just how polluting industry near their homes really is for the first time - as in Dalian last week when a leak from a paraxylene factory led to major demonstrations and a remarkable climbdown by authorities. The optimists say journalists on state TV have been allowed to talk about the corruption and technological cost-cutting that led to last month's fatal high-speed train crash, and they're hopeful this is part of a gradual opening up.

There are also plenty who believe information is more restricted than ever - and are willing to believe all sorts of lurid rumours, like one that spread about the said train crash, saying authorities had buried the whole train to cover it up, even with some injured people still alive on it. What we hear in the international press - stories few Chinese have access to - makes it clear that those rumours may not be true, but the crackdown on dissent is real, as hundreds of activists have been detained, in a sharp rise both in a the number of people being prosecuted for political crimes and the length of their jail sentences since the 2008 Olympics. The treatment of Ai Weiwei- who was subjected to over 50 interrogations - might make headlines, but there are hundreds like him. Mention this to Chinese people, though, and you encounter indifference - they often either say 'if those people are in jail, they must have done something bad' or 'sorry, I'm just not really interested in politics'. This latter is very common among the young, for whom China's recent, deeply ideological history has been reduced to kitsch, neon-coloured Mao memorabilia or T-shirts of Barack Obama as a Red Guard. For democratic activists, apathy is a far more worrying trend than the police crackdown - if you can't get young people to care about freedom of speech, any fight for change is pointless.

A paper kiosk in Beijing, selling a mix of pure propaganda and some slightly more outspoken publications.

Policeman in Tianamen Square.

Socialist-realist art.

Works in Beijing's 798 art district, which began as a centre for protest art by dissidents and now seems to have been sanitised by the authorities, as a place to allow creative expression (and graffiti, seen nowhere else in China) within officially circumscribed parameters (a Chinese tradition that dates back to the Song Dynasty, according to my sinologist sister).