In Shanghai, Hong Kong and Beijing, the post-Olympics chatter keeps wondering the same thing: where on earth is that boost to the Chinese economy that everyone was forecasting?

Beneath the disappointment – a misery made worse by another sharp plunge in mainland Chinese stocks last week – is a deeper concern. Rather than acting as the jaw-dropping “coming-out party” that everyone had hoped for, the Games offered a brief, unsettling glimpse into the minds of Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao.

Analysts saw a leadership obsessed with control, whose attitude has shifted from offence to defence. For an administration that prized the Olympics just as highly as it did entry into the World Trade Organisation six years ago, the country’s rulers now micromanage the economy more than they did before China joined.

The accent now, according to Willy Lam, a veteran China analyst, is on maintaining stability and safeguarding China’s achievements, rather than blazing new trails or taking risks in the hope of attaining ever grander visions. That, he argues, will shape the policy response to the coming economic storm, whether the response comes in the form of a giant financial package to stimulate the markets, a doubling of national spending on science or a heftier tax on exported disposable chopsticks.

Equally, some argue, the micromanagement could misfire. The astonishingly rapid profit growth within the banking sector could, analysts for Asianomics speculate, prompt government attempts to curb lending rates and force the banks to be more dutiful to their “national service”.

The Hu-Wen axis in its present form is emphatically not the axis whose apparent eagerness to globalise China triggered such enthusiastic investment from around the world. As the Olympics showed, China’s leadership is more determined to control all aspects of the economy and society than anyone believed five years ago. This is not, for example, a juncture at which the State is likely to loosen its ownership control of the 160 “mega-firms” that dominate the country’s corporate scene.

If that axis is going to respond effectively to the mounting challenges of slowdown, a potential property price collapse, rising unemployment and other woes confronting China, there is every chance that it will do so with Chairman Mao’s old adage in mind: reform, he said famously, is not a dinner party.

There is already some evidence that the attitude will be reflected in the legal system – a system in which public trust remains quite low. Many were shocked, Dr Lam says, when Wang Shengjun, the newly appointed president of the Supreme People’s Court, vowed that the courts would heed the Communist Party’s call to attack “state enemies” and to safeguard socio-political stability.

Before everything stopped for the Olympics, the Communist Party unveiled plans for a plenary session on financial and economic strategies for next year. The session, scheduled for next month, is expected to focus on more innovation, less pollution, curbing inflation and, perhaps most critically, the pursuit of “relatively fast economic growth”.

That, some say, is a signal that the authorities are turning their attention to engineering a boost to domestic consumption – a project whose long-term achievement could amount to the biggest migration programme in history as the State herds 300 million peasants towards the cities over the next two decades.

However, many market players wonder what is to come in the short term. Certainly, there is widespread confidence that the Government will step in to shore up property prices if they begin to fall too hard and too quickly – a gambit unlikely to play well with Chinese who have been waiting for prices to fall to make their move on the market.

Measures to rescue the stock market are not widely expected to succeed, but are almost certain to be attempted. Many small investors have been badly burnt by their first foray into the markets and the precipitous nosedive of their assets and a prolonged bear market would not support the Government’s desire to ignite more consumer activity.

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