China's Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation

by Cheng Li (Editor)

The rapid emergence and explosive growth of China's middle class have enormous consequences for that nation's domestic future, for the global economy, and for the whole world. In China's Emerging Middle Class, noted scholar Cheng Li and a team of experts focus on the sociopolitical ramifications of the birth and growth of the Chinese middle class over the past two decades.

The contributors, from diverse disciplines and different regions, examine the development and evolution of China's middle class from a variety of analytical perspectives. What is its educational and occupational makeup? Are its members united by a common identity—by a shared political vision and worldview? How does the Chinese middle class compare with its counterparts in other countries? The contributors shed light on these and many other issues pertaining to the rapid rise of the middle class in the Middle Kingdom.

Contributors: Jie Chen (Old Dominion University), Deborah Davis (Yale University), Bruce J. Dickson (George Washington University), Geoffrey Gertz (Brookings), Han Sang-Jin (Seoul National University), Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao (National Taiwan University), Homi Kharas (Brookings), Li Chunling (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Jing Lin (University of Maryland–College Park), Sida Liu (University of Wisconsin– Madison), Lu Hanlong (Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences), Joyce Yanyun Man (Peking University–Lincoln Center), Ethan Michelson (Indiana University–Bloomington), Qin Chen (Hohai University), Xiaoyan Sun (Beijing Foreign Studies University), Luigi Tomba (Australian National University), Jianying Wang (Yale University), and Zhou Xiaohong (Nanjing University).

Genres: China

415 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2010

Reviews

[Liquidlasagna · Rating 4 out of 5]

There have been only a few studies to date in English that have tried to analyze the impact of the rise of the middle class in China on China's current system and to assess what kind of changes in that system the middle class might support.

This book edited by Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution combines work by Chinese scholars, who have until now mainly written in Chinese, with the work of scholars located outside of China. Much of this work focuses on the most fundamental problem involved in analyzing the role of the middle class, that is, defining just who is a member of this class and who is not....

The strength [of this book] lies in the range of disagreement on what constitutes the middle class in China. Not only does one get the views of some of the major writers in the field, there is also an essay by Cheng Li that reviews much of the other literature in the field....

Overall this is a useful collection of essays that will provide a basis for getting more of the English-speaking scholarly world involved in these issues in greater depth than has been the case to date.

The Developing Economies Journal

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the wilde Amazonrothrop

Middle Class an agent of democratization in China nowadays?

This book consists of 15 scholarly essays on sociopolitical transformation of the emerging middle class in China. The contributors are eminent scholars from US, China, Taiwan, Korea, and Australia who studies key issues pertaining to the evolution and characteristics of China's middle class and its predictable impacts on democratic development in China. There are homogeneous and heterogeneous views on China's middle class and this book contains a variety of arguments, insights, scenarios and methodologies to this nascent sociopolitical phenomenon:-

1 The evolution and growth of China's middle class is and will be contingent on different synchronic (i.e. economic globalization due to international flow of western capitalism) and diachronic factors (i.e. economic modernization led by the Chinese Communist Party, privatization of the housing sector, higher education development). The CCP has been well aware of its potential political implications for the PRC political system as it continues to expand exponentially.

2 The rapid expansion of the Chinese middle class has profoundly changed China's social stratification and economic landscape for the previous two decades. The study of China's middle class will be a global subject that concerns economists, sociologists and political scientists from the western world as China will surpass the US to become the world's largest middle-class country.

3 It is barely possible to define China's middle class by defining it as a single instead of plural social stratification. The Chinese middle class exhibits unique characteristics in terms of heterogeneous social and age composition, multiple identities, diverse occupations, grassroots identity, and political values so that it is less plausible to estimate its size and political trajectory via the application of widely-accepted definitions and theories from the western world.

4 It remains uncertain to establish an optimistic or pessimistic view towards the growth of middle class and democratization process in China, although recent survey findings have revealed that people from the middle class are politically conservative and they lack collective class identity and a unified class consciousness.

There is a plethora of books and scholarly essays pertaining to the study of China's economic modernization and its democratization prospect.

Proponents of modernization theory (Barrington Moore, Samuel Huntington, and Seymour Lipset) have maintained that there is a link between the emergence of middle class and political democratization.

Contributors to this book have concluded that most people from the middle class are not antagonistic towards the government (they are not the vanguard of democracy) while they continue to pursue social stability and material interests at the expense of their individual liberties.

In other words, there is a disconnect between the middle class and the growth of democracy in China.

However, contributors in this book, including leading scholars from China and Taiwan, have "cautiously" remarked that the political equation between the Chinese middle class and the government is "dialectical" or "situational".

An increase in political awareness and participation by the middle class is still possible which can presage its political role as the agent of democratization if the CCP cannot maintain its quality of governance and pro-business policies.

This book is highly recommend to readers who are interested in having a sophisticated understanding of the evolution of middle class and democratization process in developing countries under an authoritarian-led regime.

Hubert Shea

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