BEIJING - If China's state-controlled newspapers, radio and television were your only sources of information here, these were the events of last week: China's Communist Party completed a historic national congress at which it picked new leaders, and the Chinese people are wholly united in fawning admiration for their benevolent rulers.

"The Communist Party always works hard to take care of the citizens. Our lives will only get better from now on," the state-run paper Liberation Daily quoted an unnamed man as saying. "The goal of making everyone wealthy is exactly what the citizens want," said a man from Shanghai in an on-the-street TV interview. "Only a party that knows what citizens want is a party that we can trust."

Even as the party tries to cast aside socialism and welcome capitalists as members, its propaganda machinery continues to operate as if the party could program people's thoughts.

Chinese newspapers, radio stations and television channels, all controlled by the state, project an image of a society still hailing the socialist credos of its former leaders while worshiping the clairvoyant wisdom of the current party leaders. Even the public bulletin boards on major Chinese Internet portals, privately owned but supervised by the government, appear to lack any dissident postings.

"This is a miracle of the 21st century that the party can train 1.3 billion people and 60 million party members to speak in one voice," Bao Tong, a former party official now closely monitored by the government, said skeptically in a telephone interview. "Even a circus cannot train their monkeys to do things like this."

Modest objectives

Propaganda doesn't serve the same purpose in modern China as it did in the time of Mao, when the goal was to foster a cult of personality and a single-minded devotion to the party.

Mao was cast as a leader, teacher and hero who should be loved and revered. People were incessantly urged to study his "Little Red Book" of quotations, which served as the ideological weapon of the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution beginning in the mid-1960s. Combined with a ban on Western books and stringent controls on the arts, Mao's propaganda permeated the country.

Today's Communist Party message has much more modest objectives.

"It's not saying, 'You have to love me.' They no longer say that," said Xudong Zhang, a New York University professor and editor of the book Whither China? Intellectual Politics in Contemporary China. In another age, Zhang said, "We were demanded to love the state. You have to love the state, love the party. Now the message is you don't have to love it, but all you need to do is show some kind of respect and know your place and don't make trouble.

"It's a much weaker form of political ideological control."

The propaganda may also not be as persuasive as in the past.

"I don't believe any of it, not even a little drop," said Guo Mei, 33, a laid-off state worker in Beijing who now works for about 50 cents an hour at a fast-food restaurant. "None of that positive propaganda has brought anything in reality to benefit us."

The harsh facts of life for Guo, stuck in a dead-end job with little hope for improvement, are at odds with the official line of the party that it aims to make everybody a little richer. Guo is one of tens of millions who have been laid off from factory jobs during the country's painful economic reforms. These workers have seen party members in charge of some of those factories become rich through ownership deals, embezzlement or both.

"Whoever's in power is not going to benefit us anyway," Guo said. "There's a Chinese saying that all crows are the same color of black, so whoever leads is going to try to get money for themselves through the power in their hands."

The new generation of leaders who took office last week, led by General Secretary Hu Jintao, understand that they face a population increasingly anxious about the gap between rich and poor and increasingly disillusioned with official corruption. That recognition is implicit in official party rhetoric and in state media pronouncements about the leadership's desire to address both issues.

But the public is increasingly sophisticated and cynical. When leaders speak to the issues of the day, their audience is skeptical.

"I actually believe the very opposite of what is published in the newspaper," said a laid-off state worker now driving a taxi in Beijing 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Fearful of reprisal, the 44-year-old asked to be identified only by his surname, Dai. "Whatever the media is promoting, China is lacking. Whatever the media begins criticizing are things that are already very widespread problems."

The challenge for the party is one largely of its own making: By opening up the country to the world and launching economic reforms nearly a quarter-century ago, the government began the slow, irreversible process of opening people's eyes to life outside the party's purview.

"The society is too diverse now. People can go into different worlds essentially, if they want to," said Dali Yang, a China expert at the University of Chicago who was in China during the party congress. "They don't have to tune in if they're not interested."

And despite the government's continuing efforts to block and filter outside sources of information, people still gain access to points of view beyond the government's reach, through the Internet, Western popular culture and growing economic freedom.

'One of many players'

"It's no longer that a totalitarian state can brainwash the population by regularly bombarding the readers with the same old messages," Zhang said. "State propaganda is only one of many players."

But the state propaganda machine can still have a constraining effect on what people think about their country, and on what they learn about their fellow citizens.

"Can you see a laid-off worker on television?" said Bao, the former Communist official. "Can you see a peasant without any food and suffering from starvation? Can you ever see anybody who sells blood for a living?

"This only shows how nervous they are," he said. "If this country was secure enough, they wouldn't be afraid of different voices."

Bao, 70, is a reminder of a time when a variety of political voices were tolerated. He was a senior aide to Zhao Ziyang, the reformist general secretary who was ousted for sympathizing with pro-democracy protests in 1989.

In the weeks leading up to the Tiananmen Square crackdown, a party chief in Shanghai closed down a pro-reform newspaper, The World Economic Herald, that dared to sympathize with the protests and resisted attempts at government censorship.

Bao's boss, Zhao, stood up for the paper shortly before he was purged. The Shanghai party chief he berated for the shutdown, Jiang Zemin, would soon be promoted to general secretary of the party, the post that Jiang held until last week.

Under Jiang, the party accelerated economic reforms but also chose to strengthen the authoritarian system of governance, stifling any attempts at organized or published political dissent. The state media hewed to both trends, printing more sensational stories to sell papers but speaking essentially with one political voice.

'Three represents'

The best evidence of the state media's declining influence was Jiang's failed effort to cultivate a cult of personality around himself. Newspapers and television promoted his "Three Represents" theory about the party (an argument justifying the party inviting capitalists as members), and the publication of a book compiling Jiang's speeches and writings was trumpeted by banner headlines. But neither the book nor the "Three Represents" theory inspired much excitement.

The propaganda machine, however, was still operating after Jiang's retirement as the party's general secretary.

"Such a sweeping shift is unprecedented in the party's history," The People's Daily reported on its English-language Web site. "Analysts say it shows the great courage and wisdom of the CPC [Communist Party of China] as well as the sterling integrity and far-sightedness of the third-generation CPC leaders with Jiang Zemin at the core."

And on some level the propaganda has an effect. For people do not offer meaningful dissent. The transfer of power last week, for example, proceeded smoothly, without protests.

"Even if people don't agree with the official message, as long as everybody mouths it, it appears to be the message," said Yang, of the University of Chicago. "This dominance is maintained even though many people do not apparently agree."