How has it done that? Over the past two decades, the Chinese Communist Party has allowed some local elections, tolerated some protests over pollution or corruption, and allowed greater freedom to travel abroad and surf the Internet (with some strict limits). And the educated, rising classes accepted the unwritten rules: you can enjoy your rising expectations, but don’t challenge the party’s authority. Meanwhile, the military has reaped spoils; not only is it being modernised, but today, its financial enterprises are a large part of China’s rising economy.

It is an example that the Iranians have, presumably, watched carefully, if only in this sense: their Revolutionary Guard, too, has grown in standing and financial clout in recent years.

Reach back a bit further in history, though, to the Solidarity uprisings in Poland in the early 1980s, and the lesson is different. There, at first, repression also worked. The security forces were called on to enforce martial law and remained loyal to a government firmly in the Soviet Union’s orbit. But over a decade’s time, the regime’s hold on power—and on the soldiers’ loyalties—eroded. Part of the reason the regime proved vulnerable was that Poles themselves saw it as a foreign implant. So when the Soviet Union began to fall apart, the security forces recognised that their own patron was heading for the rocks.

But the model doesn’t really fit Iran. The clerics may be many things—fundamentalist, intolerant—but their trump card is that they are Iranian to core, and that their own revolution 30 years ago ejected an autocrat whose chief supporter abroad was the United States.

... contd.