For the past two weeks 7,500 Special Olympics athletes and their families have taken centre stage in Shanghai. The World Summer Games 2007 have been given top billing in the Chinese media, the venues have been uniformly impressive and the organisation second to none, occasional bureaucratic hiccups apart.
The recruitment of 40,000 Chinese medical students to act as volunteers and the ubiquitous presence of billboards emblazoned with the Special Olympic slogan "I Know I Can", have added to the impression that the event has been taken very seriously indeed by Chinese officialdom. However, discussion groups and research meetings which have been running alongside the sports events at the Special Olympics suggest that for many people with intellectual disability in China, the organisation's ideals of equality and social inclusiveness are still more notional than real.
One theme which has emerged over and over has been the way in which Chinese special needs children are subjected to bullying and teasing at school - or are simply shut away out of sight. At last week's Global Youth Summit, some 30 athletes spoke about their experiences of discrimination and isolation. The athletes were drawn from all over the world, but the story of a young girl from the Chinese city of Guangzhou was one of the most heartbreaking. Abandoned by her mother when she was very young, she told the conference how her classmates had laughed at her. "They said my mother didn't want me because I was a fool. I was deeply hurt, but I told myself I still have dad and he loves me - that's enough," she said.
The official position is that attitudes to disability, both physical and intellectual, are changing in China at a terrific rate. It is probably true. Everything in China is changing rapidly. In the past two years Shanghai's municipal government has established training centres which aim to enable those with intellectual disability to lead independent lives. The city also boasts a number of high-quality special needs schools. But as the headlong gallop towards a market economy gathers pace, the signs are that life is going to get tougher rather than easier for those at the bottom of the social pile - which is where people with intellectual disability often find themselves.
The ceremony which brought the games to a close at Jiangwan Stadium in Shanghai last night will doubtless earn as many international plaudits for the Chinese government as the superbly-choreographed opening extravaganza. But for China's 83 million people with disabilities, the real test will be, not what has happened over the past fortnight, but what happens in the future.