Big news on the internet wires is about the failure of Beijing’s much-touted pollution controls and the more extreme measures government is planning on introducing, if the pollution does not dissipate in the coming days. These measures include further vehicular restrictions in Beijing itself, and expanding the current restrictions to the entire province of Hebei and nearby city of Tianjin. Factories and coal-fired power plants would also be temporarily shut down in these areas. Overall, these harsher rules would affect some 100 million people over a 83,500 square mile area.

Obviously, this is a quick fix. The changes are short-term and, after the Olympics, we can expect Beijing to go back to its smog-churning ways (not to mention whining about how China is a developing country when richer nations ask for emissions to be cut). There has been no change in the governance, law, enforcement, political culture, or official party policy behind these cuts–they’re merely in place so that Beijing can put on a good face for the Olympics.

Communists have never liked looking at things in shades of gray.

But will there be a social change? Will Beijingers, seeing that some purposeful community action can make a huge change (assuming, of course, that the skies will clear up), get to have a taste for blue skies, once they see them again? Might this trial in Olympic face-saving make Chinese citizens more environmentally sensitive, and bring about a positive, long-term change?

It would be nice to give an optimistic “yes!”, but the Chinese people have proven to be a lot less predictable than that. The Western world thought, after all, that the democracy walls and Tiananmen protests would foster a similar long-term desire for democracy–hopes that were, infamously, dashed.

So, don’t hold out hope for anything more than temporary change: As a whole, Chinese people will go back to buying cars and redecorating their apartments and otherwise securing their own piece of the Chinese development dream. The government will go back to talking tougher on the environment than they can practically enforce. Developed nations will return to blaming global heating on cheap Chinese goods.

But, again, maybe that’s the much-vaunted Olympic spirit: to provide a glimpse of a bright, cooperative future set against a background of blue skies. Let’s hope that, however fleeting it may be, it’ll be an image that we can return to, and draw hope from.