Visitors flying in to Beijing's new Norman Foster-designed airport, or gazing across Shanghai's Huangpu River from the Bund to the tower city of Pudong, are liable to think of China as a land that has turned its back on the past.

Watch the destruction of old Beijing to make room for a city of concrete, steel and glass, take the world's highest railway to Tibet or drive across 20-mile bridges, and you seem to be witnessing a country on steroids that cannot wait to embrace a future in which it feels destined to displace the hidebound powers that dominated the last century.

In one sense, this is correct. It is exactly 30 years since Deng Xiaoping unbottled the genie of market economics after the power struggle that followed the death of Mao Zedong in 1976. Growth on capitalist terms has become the leitmotiv of the last important power ruled by a Communist party. But, while the party leader, Hu Jintao, preaches the virtues of a “harmonious society”, wealth disparities increase and the gap between the booming coastal provinces and the poor interior shows no sign of narrowing.

In the past 30 years, more people have been made materially better off in a shorter time than ever before - in part simply because of the sheer numbers involved. But the past is no more another country in China than anywhere else - and that past needs to be understood to grasp the deeper currents beneath the gleaming modern China.

Though it has evolved over the centuries, the pattern of top-down autocratic rule set by the First Emperor after he united China in 221BC persists. In its Marxist-Leninist-Maoist-Dengist form, the present regime claims the Mandate of Heaven as Imperial rulers did over the centuries before the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912.

In his speech to the five-yearly Communist Party Congress last October, Mr Hu insisted that only communist rule could ensure China's future. It is as if Gordon Brown tapped into the divine right of kings to insist that new Labour must remain in power.

Under the Qing, provincial magistrates feathered their nests and oppressed the peasants. Today local party bosses cut deals with businessmen to grab land from farmers and use the police or their own bully boys to harass anyone who dares to stand up to them.

But the more benevolent strain of the Imperial heritage encapsulated in Confucianism, with its emphasis on mutual obligations is also enjoying a revival. A huge Confucian Disneyland is planned for the sage's birthplace in eastern China.

This represents the rediscovery of a tradition held up by Mao as being at the root of China's backwardness. But it may not be entirely innocent - it has always seemed to me that one reason for Confucianism's appeal to China's rulers is its strict system of obligations, based on the filial piety of the father-son relationship. If the ruler is benevolent, the people owe him allegiance. Since it is the ruler who defines benevolence, this can be a one-way street. As a 19th-century defender of Confucianism put it “all in proper place, just as hats and shoes are not interchangeable”. What could be more fitting for a regime dealing with a social and economic revolution on the scale of China's?

There are many more examples of the way in which the past is showing through the hubbub of the 21st century. The power of provinces is as much a problem for Beijing as it was for the late empire. A new aristocracy consisting of “princelings” children of first-generation party leaders has emerged.

Shanghai has recaptured the glittering economic role it played before the communist victory in 1949, founding its wealth - now as then - on an army of poorly paid migrant workers. Deng's embrace of foreign technology echoed the motto of late 19th-century economic modernisers: “Use barbarian methods to defeat the foreigners.” And, when autocratic rule is at risk, force remains the ultimate arbiter.

Another echo of the past is evident in how the Prime Minister, Wen Jiabao, reacted to this year's natural disasters. In the West, it is part of any national leader's job to fly in to assure victims that their pain is shared. Less so in China. But when winter weather disrupted public transport in southern China, Wen popped up unannounced with a loudhailer at a railway station in Hunan province to tell stranded migrant workers unable to get home for the Lunar New Year holiday he was “deeply apologetic”. Last month he broke off a provincial tour in another part of the country to fly to Sichuan to assure victims of the earthquake that “Grandpa Wen” was looking after their interests.

At the weekend Mr Wen toured two other provinces hit by the earthquake, Gansu and Shaanxi, eating potatoes and maize with farmers, telling schoolchildren of the need for solidarity. As he was about to leave, he saw tears in the eyes of the students and offered to lead the class in song: “If everyone contributes a little bit of love, the world will be a better place.” And during a visit to the Communist Party newspaper The People's Daily on Friday, Mr Hu went online at the paper's website. Three hundred questions flooded in. The party leader, jacketless and in an open-necked shirt, answered three.

His answers might not have been the usual laid-back chat-room stuff (“The web is an important channel for us to understand the concerns of the public and assemble the wisdom of the public”) but they represent a recognition that the people want greater openness. This may be only gesture politics - Chinese internet portals are closely monitored and a retired schoolteacher who criticised building standards of schools in Sichuan has been arrested on charges of “inciting state subversion”.

But “Grandpa Wen's” visits to the disaster scene fits neatly into the historic pattern of the concerned ruler speeding to care for his people and Mr Hu's chat-room excursion can be seen as the emperor going down among his people.

Given the fault lines created by 30 years of invigorating but unbalanced growth, China's leaders need to show a degree of benevolence to buttress popular support. How to do that without relinquishing their grip on power is a problem they share with rulers dating back through the millennia.

The Penguin History of Modern China by Jonathan Fenby has just been published by Allen Lane