China's middle class is starting to look a lot like America's, and that's not a good thing

China's middle class has grown explosively in the past twenty years. In 2000, roughly 3% of the country's population was classified as middle class. By 2018, more than half of China's population — 707 million people — had entered the country's middle-income bracket, according to calculations from the Center for Strategic and International Studies that defined the middle class as those spending