Stumbling on the Rocky Road: Understanding China's middle class

Abstract

The evolution of Chinese class structure since economic reform has followed a pattern similar to what is found in modernized industrial societies. This is evident in the advancement of occupational structure and particularly the expansion of middle class strata in the past three decades. The emerging middle class has also attracted the attention of both policy-makers and the academia, and China is expected to become a middle class society in the foreseeable future. In this paper, I study China's middle class by looking at its composition and growth, consumption behaviour, and life satisfaction and social-political attitude based on the data drawn from the national probability surveys and official figures.