A fear of social chaos among a population who suffered through the Cultural Revolution and the feeling that there is a better future, even under the current political system, also make revolt unlikely, they say.

A web campaign calling for demonstrations Sunday in 13 major Chinese cities similar to those that brought down the regimes in Egypt and Tunisia was met with a massive security crack down and the arrest of several top activists.

China's ruling Communist party has seemingly learned the lessons of the 1989 Tiananmen Square democracy protests, which ended in a bloody crackdown that saw hundreds, if not thousands, killed by army fire in the heart of Beijing.

"I don't think China will be the next domino," Perry Link, a China scholar at the University of California at Riverside, told AFP.

"If you add together the parts of the population who are intimidated, who have been bought off, who have been indoctrinated or are in the dark, who would rebel but are not organised there just isn't a big enough part of the population left to make a domino."

The leaders in Beijing have watched with concern as revolution swept through Tunisia and Egypt, and then spread to Bahrain, Yemen, Morocco and Libya, where dozens and maybe hundreds may have been killed in days of unrest.

In response, the Communist government has detained up to 100 leading rights activists and lawyers, according to campaigners. It has also forcefully censored media reports about the unrest, and restricted Internet chat.

Officials are especially wary of the power of social media a major factor in the organisation of the Arab protests as more than 450 million people are now online in China, or about a third of the population.

Jean-Louis Rocca, a sociologist at Tsinghua University in Beijing, said the situation in China does not closely resemble that in the Middle East and North Africa despite some similarities, making a revolution unlikely.