With artist Ai Weiwei the latest dissident to be officially detained or simply disappear into the widening maw of China’s security crackdown following anonymous online calls for a “Jasmine Revolution,” a new report from the Pew Research Center bolsters arguments that Beijing is overreacting. Mr. Ai, an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, was taken into custody at the Beijing airport Sunday as he was about to board a flight for Hong Kong. He is the highest-profile figure yet to be caught up in a wave of arrests and detentions that many observers have interpreted as a preemptive strike against the possibility of Egypt-style popular unrest. Ever since Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak was toppled by a largely peaceful revolution in February, setting off speculation that the same could happen to leaders in Beijing, economists and skeptical China watchers have been at pains to point out that Chinese people as a whole are happier with their lives than Egyptians. The Pew report , based on the organization’s Global Attitudes survey , illustrates just how large that happiness differential is. The report starts off acknowledging that it’s difficult to get a clear read on the appetite for democracy in China, as: “Unlike in the Arab world, where opinion surveys have demonstrated public support for such basic democratic rights as free elections and freedom of speech, in China it is not possible to ask citizens about their views on democracy. The government won’t allow it.” But Pew argues that measuring personal and economic satisfaction, subjects that are allowed to be raised in surveys, enables some comparison. According to Pew’s survey, conducted in the spring of 2010, 87% of Chinese respondents said they were satisfied with the way things were going in their country, Pew says. Just 28% of Egyptians said the same, compared with 69% who were dissatisfied with their country’s direction. In both countries these findings were closely linked to views on the economy: 91% of Chinese characterized their country’s economic situation as good, compared with only 20% of Egyptians who said the same. The number of Egyptians describing their country’s economic situation as good fell by more than half, from 53% in 2007. The contrast was even more apparent, Pew says, when examining personal satisfaction over time. In the 2010 survey, the organization asked survey respondents to place themselves on a zero-to-10 scale it called the “ladder of life,” with zero representing the worst possible life and 10 representing the best. By this measure, China and Egypt scored almost identically, with 63% of Egyptians and 62% of Chinese rating their lives between a four and a six ( PDF ). (Americans appeared vastly more satisfied, with 64% giving their lives scores between seven and 10.) The difference appeared when respondents were asked to judge how far their lives had come and how far they were likely to progress in the future. Nearly two thirds of Chinese people said their lives had improved over the past five years, according to Pew, while an even larger 74% said they expected their lives would be better in another five. By contrast, only 18% of Egyptians felt their lives had improved over the past five years, while 40% expected things would get worse in the future. “The prevailing feeling in Egypt was one of losing ground,” the report says. “In fact, between 2007 and 2010, the number of Egyptians reporting a low quality of life doubled, suggesting that in the lead-up to this year’s popular revolt frustrations may have been mounting not only with respect to democratic yearnings, but in terms of personal aspirations.” In a blog post written not long before Hosni Mubarak stepped down, New Yorker China correspondent Evan Osnos, who lived in Cairo for two years as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, described Egypt prior to the protests as “a nation in suspended animation” where “the dominant national characteristic was sclerosis.” China, he argued, is the opposite, “a place of constant, dizzying, churning change.” One recent change, which the Pew report doesn’t capture, is China’s rising inflation, which has been hovering stubbornly around 5% for the past several months. As one of China’s banks unwittingly pointed out when it posted an old newspaper clipping on its microblog last month, inflation was a pressing concern in China in the lead up to the 1989 protests on Tiananmen Square. Rising prices have led to some public grumbling over the ineffectiveness of government tightening measures, particularly when it comes to housing. That might have a damping effect on Chinese optimism about the future, although it bears noting that inflation in China has a long way to go before it matches the 20% clip it achieved in 1989. The Pew report acknowledges that it would be naïve to assume that economic growth alone is sufficient to ward off the sort of public rage that has roiled regimes in the Middle East. Indeed, Pew says, a robust economy might conceivably be part of the problem: “Arguably, widespread optimism in China could inflate popular expectations, which if unmet could lead to personal or social frustration.” Another segment of the organization’s 2010 survey found 80% of respondents in China supporting the idea that the environment should be protected even at the expense of jobs and economic growth – a possible sign that Chinese people have grown wealthy enough to turn their attention to issues other than their own financial situation. That said, Pew seems to believe China’s leaders don’t have to worry about facing a revolution any time soon. “It would be wrong to assume that the Chinese public is indifferent to the performance of their national or local governments,” the report says. “But the Chinese public’s overall state of mind is very distant from the pessimism that helped set the stage for massive protests in Egypt.” –Josh Chin. Follow him on Twitter @joshchin

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Pew: China Not Ripe for Revolution