Vanity Fair on Beijing’s Olympic Makeover, via Shanghai Eye:

Much is made of Beijing’s rising arts scene and the existence of an unofficial counterculture here—as if such departures from uniformity amount to significant openings for personal expression and creativity. It’s nonsense. The arts are impotent by definition, the counterculture is pretend, and creativity is allowed to flourish only in measure of its irrelevance to power.

I'm sure the real situation is a bit more nuanced than that, but from my POV I wouldn't dispute this.