The task fell to the president and general secretary of the Party, Jiang Zemin. At the Party’s most important meeting, in 2002, he executed a major rhetorical contortion: he couldn’t bring himself to use the term middle class, but he declared that, from then on, the Party would dedicate itself to the success of the “New Middle-Income Stratum.” The New Middle-Income Stratum was everywhere, hailed by apparatchiks and enshrined in new slogans.
