Journal of Contemporary China

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Locating China’s Middle Classes: social

intermediaries and the Party-state

David S.G. Goodman

To cite this article: David S.G. Goodman (2016) Locating China’s Middle Classes: social
intermediaries and the Party-state, Journal of Contemporary China, 25:97, 1-13, DOI:
10.1080/10670564.2015.1060757

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JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CHINA, 2016
Vol. 25, No. 97, 1–13
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10670564.2015.1060757

Locating China’s Middle Classes: social intermediaries and the

Party-state
David S. G. Goodman
Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, China

ABSTRACT
The middle class has emerged as a political phenomenon in China since
2002 through a state-sponsored discourse that sees it as a universal and
universalising class. Although the evidence from other countries suggests
that the growth of middle classes leads to regime change, this seems to be an
unlikely outcome for China. In the first place, China’s middle class discourse
has uncertain sociological foundations. Secondly, where the middle classes
are identifiable they still probably constitute no more than 12% of the
population. Thirdly, China’s middle classes have a very close relationship to
the Party-state. Most of the professional and managerial middle classes are
part of, or closely associated with, the Party-state; and the entrepreneurial
middle class has either emerged from within the Party-state or has been
incorporated into it.

Since 2002, social politics in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have increasingly come to centre
on the behaviour and actions of the middle class. Two-thirds of the population now self-identify as,
or aspire to be, middle class; much consumption is targeted at the middle class; and the Party-state
itself has come to embrace the notion of the middle class as a social and political force for stability
and its own legitimacy. Growth targets for the proportion of the population to be considered middle
class have even been set, as the Party-state encourages social change. In 2005, it was announced that
40% of the workforce would be middle class by 2010; and in 2007 the target was raised to 55% of the
population by 2020.
From a social science perspective these observations are somewhat confronting, even leaving aside
the more obvious ironies of middle class communism. Despite its opening-up to capitalist influences
since 1978,1 China remains a reforming socialist market political economy, where GDP per capita (in PPP)
is still only US$11,907 (2014) and the median individual income is considerably lower. This compares
to US$53,042 for the USA or US$38,452 for the United Kingdom, and not greatly more than the level
achieved by the Soviet Union at the height of its economic success. The discourse of the middle class
has become powerful in many countries, both as a tool to legitimate the state and as a motivator of
individual socio-economic behaviour, and that is clearly one explanation for the embrace of the middle
class in China. The discourse of the middle class is an aspiration of greater equality at a time of increasing
economic and social inequality. At the same time, the identification of the middle class in China requires
further examination if its processes of social and potential political change are to be understood.

CONTACT  David S. G. Goodman  david.goodman@xjtlu.edu.cn

1
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), ch. 4.
© 2015 Taylor & Francis
2    D. S. G. GOODMAN

The term the middle class, or middle classes, has been applied to a diverse (and often contradic-
tory) range of social categories defined variously by different approaches to occupation, numbers and
wealth.2 Certainly, until fairly recently, the idea of the middle class was rarely incorporated positively
in a Marxist or Communist frame of reference. For Marx and Weber the middle classes were of little
consequence. For Marx the very notion of a middle class which was not part of the polarisation of
society could safely be ignored. For Weber it was a residual category, which included the peasantry,
along with artisans, officials, teachers and intellectuals. With the development of industrial society, the
middle class became the new class, sometimes called technocrats, who were responsible for both state
administration and the professional and managerial support necessary for economic and enterprise
development.3
In the USA after the Second World War the notion of the middle class became equated with that of
the white-collar worker.4 At this time the popularisation of the idea of the middle class went hand in
hand with economic growth and rising standards of living in the developed world. The middle class
now became the promise of prosperity and social harmony: the comfortable life for everyone, not
only the middle as the majority but also the comfortable, centrist middle. Ironically, even Galbraith’s
reminder about the dangers of private wealth and public poverty—The Affluent Society—has come to
be regarded as a peon to the middle class rather than the warning he intended.5
Later academic discussion on the identity of the middle class or classes focused on understanding
the social dynamics of advanced industrial society. Prime amongst these were Anthony Giddens, who
built on the work of neo-Weberians such as John Goldthorpe to develop the idea of the intermediate
classes. Where the dominant classes were defined by their control of wealth and capital, and the subor-
dinate classes by their reliance on their physical labour, the intermediate classes were defined by their
possession of skills, knowledge and experience.6
Remarkably (because of the once impassable ideological divide) this definition of the middle class,
and these distinctions, was also eventually accepted by the more Marxist of commentators, such as
Erik Olin Wright.7 Dale Johnson highlighted the extent to which the new middle classes were being
alienated by the very system which had created their socio-economic position, thereby creating a
polarised opposition to capital.8 Butler and Savage elaborated the extent to which the new interme-
diate classes of late industrial society became those who were publicly trusted to exercise their skills,
knowledge and experience.9
In practical terms, with one major exception, there has been a high degree of agreement amongst
social scientists about which socio-economic groups might constitute the intermediate classes. There
has been agreement that professionals and managers should certainly be included, but some disagree-
ment about whether or not there might be an entrepreneurial middle class. The equation of the middle
class with entrepreneurs became particularly strong for some comparative political scientists, most
notably Barrington Moore and Samuel Huntington, who saw entrepreneurs (Moore) and the middle

2
Richard Robison and David S. G. Goodman, ‘The new rich in Asia: economic development, social status and political
consciousness’, in Richard Robison and David S. G. Goodman, eds, The New Rich in Asia: Mobile Phones, McDonalds and
Middle Class Revolution (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 1–16.
3
James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution: What is Happening in the World? (New York: Norton, 1941); Ralf Dahrendorf,
Class and Class Conflict in an Industrial Society (London: Routledge, 1959); J. K. Galbraith, The New Industrial Revolution
(London: Allen Lane, 1968).
4
C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951).
5
J. K. Galbraith, The Affluent Society (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1958).
6
Anthony Giddens, The Class Structure of Advanced Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1973); John H. Goldthorpe, Social Mobility
and Class Structure in Modern Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
7
Stephen Edgell, Class (London: Routledge, 1993); Erik Olin Wright, Class Counts: Comparative Studies in Class Analysis
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
8
Dale Johnson, Class and Social Development: A New Theory of the Middle Class (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1982).
9
Tim Butler and Mike Savage, eds, Social Change and the Middle Classes (London: UCL Press, 1995).
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CHINA   3

Table 1. PRC class composition of workforce, 1952–2006 (percentage).

Class 1952 1978 1988 2001 2006

State and social administrators 0.5 1.0 1.7 2.1 2.3
Managers 0.1 0.2 0.5 1.6 2.6
Private entrepreneurs 0.2 – – 1.0 1.3
Individual business owners 4.1 – 3.1 7.1 9.5
Professional and technical personnel 0.9 3.5 4.8 4.6 6.3
Office workers 0.5 1.3 1.7 7.2 7.0
Employees of commercial services 3.1 2.2 6.4 11.2 10.1
Industrial working class 6.4 19.8 22.4 17.5 14.7
Agricultural labourers 84.2 67.4 55.8 42.9 40.3
Urban and rural unemployed and semi-employed – 4.6 3.6 4.8 5.9
Sources: 1952–1988: Lu Xueyi, Dangdai Zhongguo shehui jieceng yanjiu baogao [Report on Research into Social Stratification
in Contemporary China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2002), p. 44; Lu Xueyi, Dangdai Zhongguo Shehui Liudong
[Social Mobility in Contemporary China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2004), p. 38; Lu Xueyi, ed., Social Structure
of Contemporary China (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2012), pp. 20 and 403. 2001 data from national sample survey
data. 2006 data from the 2005 sample survey of 1% of the Chinese population undertaken by National Bureau of Statistics and the
2006 National General Social Survey of CASS, Institute of Sociology.

classes (Huntingdon) as the agents and drivers of regime change. Moore’s famous phrase ‘no bourgeois,
no democracy’ has become a starting point for almost everyone investigating the relationship between
entrepreneurs and political change.10
The search for China’s middle class has to start with an understanding of the structural implications
of the PRC as a reforming socialist market economy, rather than a more open capitalist economy.
China has elements of a redistributive economy alongside and interacting with elements of a market
economy.11 There is a vast growing marketised sector of the urban economy, and market forces have
impacted on the operation of the public sector. At the same time though, the redistributive economy
has clearly remained politically superior. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) at the 3rd Plenum of its
18th Central Committee in late 2013 spelled out its intent in this regard quite specifically:
We must unswervingly consolidate and develop the public economy, persist in the dominant position of pub-
lic ownership, give full play to the leading role of the state-owned sector, and continuously increase its vitality,
controlling force and influence. We must unwaveringly encourage, support and guide the development of the
non-public sector, and stimulate its dynamism and creativity.12
There may be a need for economic resources to be allocated through the market, but it is the role of
the state to intervene to correct ‘the imperfections of the market’. The balance may change in the future
but the evidence of development to the middle of 2015 remains one where the public sector and the
Party-state dominate.
The Party-state and its cadres still allocate economic resources, though no longer through a national
Plan, and more usually at the local level.13 There is a labour market but it is maintained in its present
form by the state’s household registration system which determines the creation of a migrant peasant

10
Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1967), p. 418; Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth
Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Jie Chen and Bruce J. Dickson, Allies of the State: China’s Private
Entrepreneurs and Democratic Change (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
11
Ivan Szelény, ‘Social inequalities in state socialist redistributive economies’, International Journal of Comparative Sociology
19, (1978), pp. 63–87; Ivan Szelény and Eric Kostello, ‘Outline of an institutional theory of inequality: the case of socialist and
postcommunist Eastern Europe’, in Mary C. Brinton and Victor Nee, eds, The New Institutionalism in Sociology (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 305–326; Ivan Szelény, ‘A theory of transitions’, Modern China 34, (2008), pp. 165–175.
12
CCP Central Committee, ‘Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China on some major
issues concerning comprehensively deepening the reform, 12 November 2013’, China.org.cn, available at:
http://www.china.org.cn/china/third_plenary_session/2014-01/16/content_31212602.htm (accessed 16 January 2014).
13
Jean Oi, ‘The role of the local state in China’s transitional economy’, The China Quarterly 144, (1995), pp. 1132–1149; Gunter
Schubert and Anna L. Ahlers, ‘County and township cadres as a strategic group’, The China Journal 67, (2012), pp. 67–86.
4    D. S. G. GOODMAN

worker reserve pool of labour.14 The economic return on being a cadre clearly extends beyond salary, and
there is considerable material benefit from being part of a cadre’s family.15 Entrepreneurs, for their part,
even those outside the public sector, may make management decisions for political and social rather
than economic reasons.16 The state sector of the economy remains dominant in many ways despite
no longer producing the majority of GDP. The banking system works to support SOEs overwhelmingly
more than other kinds of enterprises with destabilising consequences for the entire economy.
There are undoubtedly identifiable intermediate middle classes in the PRC just as there are elsewhere.
In China though, the intermediate middle classes are a very small portion of the total population, and
nowhere near being either the majority, that is suggested by the CCP’s projections of growth, nor the
middle sectors of society in terms of income or any other aspect of distribution. The best estimate would
seem to suggest that the intermediate middle classes constitute about 12% of the total population.
Moreover, China’s middle classes are most unlikely to be agents of regime change. The relationship
between the professionals and managers on the one hand, and the Party-state on the other could not
be closer, not least since many remain employed within or have emerged from the Party-state. This also
applies to the entrepreneurial middle classes, most of whom had previously worked in the Party-state
or whom have been more recently incorporated into politics. Indeed, the most obvious characteristic
of China’s intermediate classes is their close relationship with and support for the Party-state, rather
than their desire for regime change. This is not to say that some may not be critical of regime policies or
wish to see more limited political reform, particularly in the direction of citizen and professional rights,
as well as procedural justice and a lessening of the extremes of inequality.

Middle class discourse

The discourse of an expanding middle class was developed in the PRC at the end of Jiang Zemin’s
term as General Secretary of the CCP in 2002. At the 16th Party Congress he announced that the social
goal was now to ‘control the growth of the upper stratum of society, expand the middle, and reduce
the bottom’.17 A large part of the genesis of this statement was recognition of the need to manage
inequality better as a social issue.18 Inequality had been growing steadily since the start of the reform
era. The Gini Coefficient is an index of income inequality where 0 indicates equality and 1 inequality.
Calculations vary, but in general terms, income inequality increased in the order of from 0.2 in 1980 to
0.43 in 2002. Inequality had become such a serious political problem for the Party-state that it ceased
to issue appropriate or comparative data after 2000 until 2013.19
The academic justification for the idea of an expanding middle class was provided by a group under
the leadership of Lu Xueyi in the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences
(CASS). Starting in 2002, a series of their reports have not only detailed social change but specifically
highlighted the importance of the middle class and middle class growth for China’s future.20 The most
recent (2010) stated:

14
Kam Wing Chan, ‘The Chinese hukou system at 50’, Economic Geography and Economics 50, (2009), pp. 197–221.
15
Andrew Walder, ‘Elite opportunity in transitional economies’, American Sociological Review 68, (2003), pp. 899–917.
16
Yu Xie and Xiaogang Wu, ‘Danwei profitability and earnings inequality in urban China’, The China Quarterly 195, (2008),
p. 560.
17
Jiang Zemin, ‘Quanmin jianshe xiaokang shehui, kaichuang Zhongguo tese shehui zhuyi shiye xin jumian—zai Zhongguo
gongchandang di shiliu ci quanguo daibiao dahui shang de baogao’ [‘Build a comprehensive xiaokang society and create
a new order of socialism with Chinese characteristics: report to the 16th Congress of the CCP’], Renmin ribao [The People’s
Daily], (18 November 2002), p. 1.
18
John W. Lewis and Xue Litai, ‘Social change and political reform in China: meeting the challenge of success’, The China
Quarterly 176, (2003), pp. 926–942.
19
Chen Jiandong Dai Dai, Ming Pu, Wenxuan Hou and Qiaobin Feng, The Trend of the Gini Coefficient of China, Brooks World
Poverty Institute Working Paper 109 (2010); ‘Gini coefficient release highlights China’s resolve to bridge wealth gap’,
Xinhua, (21 January 2013), p. 2.
20
Lu Xueyi, ed., Dangdai Zhongguo shehui jieceng yanjiu baogao [Report on Research into Social Stratification in Contemporary
China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2002); Lu Xueyi, Dangdai Zhongguo Shehui Liudong [Social Mobility in
Contemporary China] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2004); Lu Xueyi, Dangdai Zhongguo shehui jiegou [The
Social Structure of Contemporary China] (Beijing: Zhongguo shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2010).
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CHINA   5

the focus of social policy should be expanding the middle class … as a buffer for social interest conflicts, to demon-
strate fair access to social status and to demonstrate modern social values … the middle class is important for
society to function well and for promoting a harmonious society … Currently, in expanding the middle class,
the Chinese government has put forth policies to increase the proportion of the middle class, improve residents’
property income and expand higher education, which have achieved positive results.21
Each report has offered an estimate of the size of the middle class. In the latest to date it was claimed
that the middle class constituted 22–23% of the working population.22
The Institute of Sociology’s reports have not only given substance to Jiang Zemin’s remarks but have
dramatically altered the discussion of class in the PRC. They have created an intellectual and policy envi-
ronment in which class by occupation exists alongside class by ideology.23 In the latter category, almost
everyone in an urban area is a ‘worker’ and those living on the land are ‘peasants’. Class by occupation is
now determined by four criteria, drawing on three from the 1990s work of Erik Olin Wright—the means
of production, position in the authority structure, and the possession of skills and expertise—to which
they added a fourth, explicitly described as providing a ‘Chinese dimension’—whether cadres were
‘inside the system’ or ‘outside the system’. This approach delivered a description of the PRC working
population in terms of ten classes, summarised in Table 1.
The wider response to Jiang’s clarion call has been equally dramatic. In 2005 it was announced that
the middle class would be 40% of the workforce by 2010 and 25% of urban households.24 In 2007 it
was announced that 55% of the population would be middle class by 2020: 78% of the urban popula-
tion, and 30% of rural residents.25 Cadres and workers were briefed, in the words of a handbook from
China’s Police Academy, that the middle class is ‘the political force necessary for stability … the moral
force behind civilized manners … the force necessary to eliminate privilege and curb poverty. It is
everything’.26 It has become commonplace for officials and strategic documents to acknowledge that
in the conceivable future ‘the middle class will be the dominant class’. The State Council’s Development
Research Center, in its 2012 report with the World Bank, stated that the explicit goal is to emulate the
experience of other industrial countries in ensuring ‘a large middle class that acts as a force for stability,
good governance, and economic progress’.27
There are some clear ambiguities in this embrace of the middle class, not the least of which is the
deliberate conflation of the term for ‘stratum’ (阶层 jieceng) now being employed in description of
the middle class, with the previously more usual term for ‘class’ (阶级 jieji). Jiang Zemin in his original
formulation had not used the term ‘class’ but rather the politically more neutral ideological formula-
tion of ‘stratum’. Lu Xueyi, however, assayed a closer equation: ‘As to the ten major social strata in the
classification of this study, theoretical meaning of the term “stratum” is close to that of the term “class”
in English’. The term ‘stratum’ had been employed, according to Lu Xueyi, in order to draw a sharp
distinction between class as now understood, and class (and class conflict) in the era of the Cultural
Revolution, as understood by Marx and Mao Zedong, and specifically as applied in the years of China’s
revolution before 1949, and under state socialism before 1978.28
A further, more serious ambiguity, is the apparent lack of identification of the middle class (or for
that matter an upper class which seems folded into the definition of the middle class faut de mieux29)
in terms of the ten strata or class descriptions proposed by the Institute of Sociology. Nowhere has

21
Lu Xueyi, ed., Social Structure of Contemporary China (Singapore: World Scientific Publishing, 2012), p. 59.
22
Ibid., pp. 19–20.
23
Yingjie Guo, ‘Class without class consciousness and class consciousness without classes: the meaning of class in the
People’s Republic of China’, Journal of Contemporary China 21, (2012), pp. 723–739.
24
‘Middle class to reach 40 per cent of workforce’, Xinhua, (15 September 2005), p. 1.
25
Wu Jiao, ‘50% of people will be middle class by 2020’,China Daily, (27 December 2007), p. 3.
26
Luigi Tomba, ‘Who’s afraid of China’s middle class’, East Asia Forum, (25 August 2011), p. 2.
27
World Bank with Development Research Center of the State Council, PRC, China 2030: Building a Modern Harmonious, and
Creative Society (Washington, DC: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, 2012), p. 16.
28
Lu Xueyi, Social Mobility in Contemporary China (Montreal: American Quantum Media, 2005), p. 419.
29
Teresa Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism: State–Society Relations in China’s Reform Era (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2010), p. 7.
6    D. S. G. GOODMAN

the Institute of Sociology substantiated its calculations of the size of the middle class by detailed and
specific reference to its ten categories. More confusingly, in its earliest description all but one of the ten
social categories (the unemployed) were said to be able to be described as part of the middle class.30
It is certainly hard to see how the numbers presented in the reports of the Institute of Sociology can
be interpreted to suggest that the middle class has either grown or will grow sufficiently in the future
towards the stated middle class goal. Since 1978 the six social categories that are most likely to include
elements of the middle class—state and social administrators, managers, private entrepreneurs, pro-
fessional and technical staff, office workers, small business people—expanded from 6% of the working
population to 29% in 2006. Yet of that 29%, 7% are office workers, 1.3% are private entrepreneurs and
9.5% are small business people,31 most of whom are marginal (if in different ways) to any possible cal-
culation of the middle class.32 Future growth towards a middle class majority (an additional 27% if the
2007 estimate of the middle class is accepted as accurate) would have to come from the transformation
of some of those who were then industrial workers (14.7% of the workforce), employees of commercial
services (10.1% of the workforce) and agricultural labourers (40.3% of the workforce) and their families.
Change may indeed come but it is worth bearing in mind that according to the same dataset, from
1990 to 2005 the proportions of agricultural labourers in the workforce decreased by 13.6%; industrial
workers rose by 2.7%; employees in commercial services rose 6.8%; office workers rose by 1.8%; and
the proportion of those who might be regarded as automatically to be included in any consideration
of middle class occupations (state and social administrators, managers, professional and technical
staff ) rose only by 3.19%.33
In general the numbers do not seem to add up. The National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) determined in
2004 that the middle class would be defined in income terms as between 60,000 and 500,000 yuan per
household per year. This was nowhere near the middle percentiles of income distribution as detailed
by NBS. In 2004, only the top 8% of the population had a per capita income of at least 60,000 yuan per
capita; and in 2009 this proportion had grown to 16%.34 In 2011 NBS statistics reported that the top
10% by income of households had an average annual per capita income of 64,461 yuan and an average
household aggregated income of 101,848 yuan; and that the next wealthiest 10% by income of house-
holds had an average annual per capita income of 39,216 yuan and an average household aggregate
income of 58,039 yuan.35 Remarkably, the NBS standard has not been adjusted since 2004, even though
there has been economic growth generally, with a doubling of GDP per capita between 2009 and 2012.

Messages of lifestyle and consumption

These ambiguities suggest that precise identification of social categories may be less important than
the development of a state-sponsored discourse of the middle class, designed to encourage economic
growth, consumption, and a belief in a rising standard of living. It also seems designed to mediate
increasing social and economic inequality, including, even to some extent, masking the emergence of
the extremely wealthy: one reason the upper class is not differentiated. The strategy seems effective: in
repeated surveys most people regard themselves as either middle class or aspirational middle class.36

30
Lu Xueyi, Dangdai Zhongguo shehui jieceng yanjiu baogao, p. 44.
31
Hu Jianguo, Li Chunling and Li Wei, ‘Social class structure’, in Lu Xueyi, ed., Social Structure of Contemporary China,
pp. 399 and 403.
32
Philip C. Huang, ‘China’s neglected informal economy: reality and theory’, Modern China 35, (2009), pp. 405–438; Philip C.
Huang, ‘Misleading Chinese legal and statistical categories: labour, individual entities, and private enterprises’, Modern
China 39, (2013), pp. 347–379.
33
Hu et al., ‘Social class structure’, p. 416.
34
Li Cheng, ‘Chinese scholarship on the middle class: from social stratification to political potential’, in Cheng Li, ed., China’s
Emerging Middle Class (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution Press, 2010), p. 71.
35
National Bureau of Statistics, China Statistical Yearbook 2012 (Beijing: China Statistics Press, 2013), p. 349.
36
Li Chunling, ‘Zhongguo dangdai zhongchan jieceng de goucheng ji bili’ [‘The composition and proportion of the present
Chinese middle class’], Zhongguo renkou kexue [Chinese Population Science] 6, (2003), pp. 25–32; Zhou Xiaohong, Zhongguo
zhongchanjieceng diaocha [Survey of the Chinese Middle Classes] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2005).
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CHINA   7

The discourse of the middle class is most apparent in the marketing of lifestyle issues and the devel-
opment of a consumer society. Private automobiles and private housing are an important first step in
the development of a middle class lifestyle, quickly followed by advanced technology purchases; shop-
ping in malls with international brands; eating out two-thirds of the time; consuming foreign food and
drink; spending leisure time in activities such as golf, sauna, teahouses; learning and speaking foreign
languages; engaging in tourism and foreign travel; and providing foreign education for one’s child.37
While these seem fairly universal middle class activities, there are also some particularly Chinese charac-
teristics. The Chinese consumer is considerably more brand conscious than consumers elsewhere, 70%
preferring to purchase a branded rather than a non-branded product, compared to 30% in the USA.38
The focus on the middle class has been very visible in the reform of higher education. University
and college graduate status is the entry point to the middle class: a necessary if not a sufficient con-
dition for middle class employment. In 1978 there were less than a million undergraduates attending
universities, and still only just over two million in 1998 when the decision was taken to expand higher
education. The sector has subsequently grown dramatically, with 32 million students enrolled in 2013;39
the number of universities and colleges more than doubling; and a huge increase in state investment
in higher education rising from 33.4 billion yuan in 1997 to 290.2 billion yuan in 2011.40
This increase in higher education has been heralded quite explicitly as increasing access to ‘create
a reserve force for the expansion of the middle class’41 and providing opportunities, especially for
women, rural residents and minority nationalities, all of whom have long been recognised as being
under-represented in higher education places. The evidence is to the contrary:
since the early 1990s in China, more university students have come from financially privileged families who have
benefitted from economic reform. Fewer qualified students from average and low-income homes have been admit-
ted, and fewer have had the financial capacity to enrol.42
A specific research project looking at four leading universities in Shaanxi, Sichuan and Anhui during
2009 reinforces the view that higher education has become the preserve of the upper and middle
classes. Women and those from rural areas were under-represented in enrolment to university. Rural
women were significantly under-represented, though urban women were not. The children of rich
rural individuals were not under-represented but those from poor areas were. Poor, rural women from
minority nationality groups were found to be the most under-represented of all. The research reached
the conclusion that ‘College is still a rich, Han, urban and male club’.43
The discourse of the middle class is also highly visible in the development of housing since the late
1990s, though in different ways to the development of higher education. For a start, housing reform
since the late 1990s has meant that almost everyone in the PRC now lives in their own home, where
the home ownership rate is 89.7% (2012) with a rate of 85.4% even in the urban areas.44 Though all of
the new housing is advertised to potential buyers in terms of a comfortable lifestyle it is the gated com-
munity—with security and the variable provision of other services—which is presented as the epitome

37
Deborah S. Davis, ‘Urban consumer culture’, The China Quarterly 183, (2005), pp. 677–694; Ann Anagnost, ‘From “class” to
“social strata”: grasping the social totality in reform-era China’, Third World Quarterly 29, (2008), pp. 497–519; Michael J.
Silverstein, Abheek Singhi, Carol Liao and David Michael, The $10 Trillion Prize: Captivating the Newly Affluent in China and
India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2012).
38
Silverstein et al., The $10 Trillion Prize, p. 40.
39
‘Tough job market for Chinese college graduates’, Xinhua, (25 June 2013), p. 1.
40
China Statistical Yearbook 2012, pp. 20–40.
41
Hu et al., ‘Social class structure’, pp. 419–420.
42
Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism, p. 66.
43
Wang Xiaobing, Chengfang Liu, Linxiu Zhang, Yaojiang Shi and Scott Rozelle, ‘College is rich, Han, urban, male club’, The
China Quarterly 214, (2013), p. 469.
44
Li Gan, ‘Findings from China Household Finance Survey’, Texas A&M University and Southwestern University of Finance
and Economics, China Household Finance Survey, 2013.
8    D. S. G. GOODMAN

of middle class living.45 Some of these gated communities can be extremely luxurious, with detached
villas standing in their own grounds.46 At the same time there are many more gated communities with
more modest blocks of apartments and townhouses.47

The intermediate classes

The recognition that there is a strong discourse of the middle class certainly does not invalidate the
search for a sociological explanation. In industrial societies it has become more usual to identify the
middle classes as the intermediate classes in terms of their possession of skills, knowledge and expe-
rience: often an ‘old middle class’ of small-scale entrepreneurs and the more successful self-employed,
and a ‘new middle class’ of (largely urban) professionals and managers.48 In China the intermediate
middle classes are also fragmented and heterogeneous, including a variety of entrepreneurial, profes-
sional and managerial classes. As might be expected though, in a reforming socialist market political
economy as opposed to an open, capitalist system, the relationship between the intermediate classes
and the state is exceptionally close.49 Many of the professional and managerial middle class are either
state officials or state sector employees (including large numbers in the education, communications and
health sectors) and many of the entrepreneurial middle class have close institutional and associational
relations with the Party-state.
The entrepreneurial middle classes have re-emerged in China with the post-1978 changed economic
development strategy, though identifying them precisely is difficult. Those of the working population
who might be identified as business people, such as the 10–11% in the CASS surveys (private entre-
preneurs, small-scale business people and the self-employed) are definitely not a single, homogenous
entrepreneurial class. Many if not most of the self-employed are essentially part of the subordinate or
working classes, with whom they have most in common in terms of their occupation, responsibilities and
life chances. By no means are all private entrepreneurs members of the economic elite, and while some
would be justly regarded as middle class in terms of the scale of their economic activities and employee
responsibilities, the majority would also be better seen as members of the subordinate classes.50
The PRC entrepreneurial middle class is characterised by its close involvement with the Party-state.
Institutionally, the Party-state still plays a role in the economy beyond the state-owned sector. It is esti-
mated that about a quarter of registered private enterprises are owned by SOEs; and an undetermined
number of additional enterprises are hybrid public–private concerns.51 Associationally, the entrepre-
neurial middle class have either emerged from within the Party-state, or been incorporated into its
activities. A survey of private entrepreneurs in five coastal provinces during 2006–2007 found that 51%
had formerly worked in the state economic sector and 19% had previously been a party or government
cadre. The same survey also found that 37.8% of entrepreneurs were CCP members. Moreover, almost
all private entrepreneurs are members of Chambers of Commerce and business associations that are

45
Huang Youqin, ‘From work-unit compounds to gated communities: housing inequality and residential segregation in
transitional Beijing’, in L. J. C. Ma and F. Wu, eds, Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space (New
York: Routledge, 2005), pp. 192–221; Choon-Piew Pow, Gated Communities in China: Class, Privilege and the Moral Politics
of the Good Life (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009); Luigi Tomba, ‘Of quality harmony and community. Civilization and the
middle class in urban China’, Positions 17, (2009), pp. 592–616.
46
Hu Xiuhong and David H. Kaplan, ‘The emergence of affluence in Beijing: residential social stratification in China’s capital
city’, Urban Geography 22, (2001), pp. 54–77; Bianca Bosker, Original Copies (Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2013).
47
Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise: Middle-class Living in a Chinese Metropolis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 130.
48
Edgell, Class, pp. 62–73.
49
Deborah S. Davis, ‘Social class transformation in urban China: training, hiring, and promoting urban professionals and
managers after 1949’, Modern China 26, (2000), pp. 251–275.
50
Huang, ‘Misleading Chinese legal and statistical categories’, pp. 353–358.
51
Ross Garnaut, Ligang Song and Yang Yao, ‘Impact and significance of state-owned enterprise restructuring in China’, The
China Journal 55, (2006), pp. 35–63; Barry Naughton, ‘China’s distinctive system: can it be a model for others?’, Journal of
Contemporary China 19, (2010), pp. 437–460.
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CHINA   9

organised by and through local government.52 Private entrepreneurs repeatedly say (through regular
surveys) that they feel a need to be in ‘the system’.53
The professional and managerial middle classes have grown considerably since 1978, probably dou-
bling as a proportion of the workforce, if from a very low base. This was the result not only of growth in
the non-state sector, but also the expansion of the state sector, both general state administration and
sectors like communications and education. In the process, the range of occupations has expanded to
include professions previously excluded (notably lawyers, but also a range including market research,
management consultants and services) or that did not exist (information technology) and became
more professionalised.
The resultant professional and managerial classes have been variously conceptualised. Wang and
Davis differentiated elements of the middle class according to education and occupation. They identi-
fied cadres; an upper middle class of managers and professionals with a college education; and a lower
middle class, comprising ordinary white-collar workers, and non-cadre managers and professionals
without a college education.54 Jie Chen identified the middle class in urban China in terms of self-
employed labourers, managers, professionals and ordinary office workers.55 Teresa Wright concentrated
on the range of different professions: intellectuals, lawyers, accountants in particular.56
Wang and Davis found that cadres were 6% of the urban working population, the upper middle
classes in their definition were 8%, and the lower middle classes were 44%.57 Jie Chen calculates that
managers were 1.5% of the population, professionals were 5.1% and 4.8% were ordinary white-collar
workers.58 These figures suggest more severe limits to the size of the urban middle class than the figures
provided by CASS. A working estimate is that the intermediate middle classes constitute about 12%
of the population. This is based on assumptions that about 1% is to be found in the entrepreneurial
middle class; 1% amongst middle class office workers; 6% the professional middle classes; and about
4% cadres and managers.
Wang and Davis’s distinction between the upper and lower middle classes suggests that the latter are
more aspirant than middle class. Not only are the upper middle classes better educated, but they earn
more, have larger financial assets, have better housing and are healthier. In addition, over the period
of their study (1995–2002), upper middle class salaries grew faster, and actually grew faster than those
of cadres and workers.59 Wang and Davis also point very clearly to the extent to which the middle class
is an essential part of the state system. In excess of four-fifths of the middle classes were employed
directly by the state. This included not only white-collar workers in the state administration and the
SOEs, managers and professionals in the state sector of the economy, but also a sizeable number of
professional and technical staff in the state utilities and service agencies.
There have been changes since that research was completed but nothing too substantial in the
relationship between the professional and managerial middle classes and the Party-state. There have,
for example, been changes in the legal profession. State legal workers started to be replaced by profes-
sionally trained lawyers in 2003, after bar exams were introduced in 2001. By 2004 there were 150,000
lawyers, and only 15% of law firms were state-owned. On the other hand, their distancing from the state
cannot be exaggerated. A high proportion of lawyers are CCP members, as might be expected, and CCP

52
Chen and Dickson, Allies of the State, pp. 37–45.
53
Bruce Dickson, Wealth into Power: The Communist Party’s Embrace of China’s Private Sector (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2008), pp. 94–95.
54
Wang Jianying and Deborah Davis, ‘China’s new upper middle classes: the importance of occupational disaggregation’,
in Cheng Li, ed., China’s Emerging Middle Class, pp. 159–162.
55
Jie Chen, A Middle Class Without Democracy: Economic Growth and the Prospects for Democratization in China (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 41.
56
Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism, pp. 70–83.
57
Wang and Davis, ‘China’s new upper middle classes’, p. 161.
58
Jie Chen, A Middle Class Without Democracy, pp. 56–57.
59
Wang and Davis, ‘China’s new upper middle classes’, pp. 163–170.
10    D. S. G. GOODMAN

attention on their work is close.60 There have also been areas of activity in which the state’s employ-
ment of the professional and managerial middle classes has increased. Most notable is the expansion
of education which has meant that from 1998 to 2011 just under an extra million full-time staff were
appointed to teach in universities alone, and another million administrators were also appointed in
higher education.61
After 1949 and before 1978, cadres had been selected for their political reliability, professionals for
their educational qualifications, and those two principles led to two separate recruitment and career
channels. After 1978, this dualism was maintained though increasingly cadres were also asked to meet
higher education qualifications, as well as meeting tests of political reliability.62 Higher education is
clearly the single most important determinant of the professional and managerial classes in the PRC,
but family influence is also not negligible. In particular there is a middle class cycle of reproduction.
Access to a professional or managerial appointment comes mainly from higher education, and access
to higher education is a function of direct parental influence.63 At the same time professional employ-
ment practice reinforces this trend: there is a high level of inheritance in the professions with children
usually following their parents.64

Values and behaviour

The intermediate middle classes, including both the entrepreneurial middle class and the professional
and managerial middle classes, are clearly limited in size. Nonetheless, they clearly have advantages by
virtue of their economic, social and cultural capital that provide the potential for interest articulation
and organisation. This possibility speaks to a wider literature about socio-political change elsewhere
that highlights the roles of the entrepreneurial middle classes65 and the urban middle classes66 in her-
alding liberal democracy.67 There is even concern within the PRC about the growth of the middle class
and impact on politics in these terms, amongst both scholars and the Party-state.68
The most obvious objection to the predictions of regime change is that the intermediate middle
classes are so fragmented that they can have no common values and attitudes. It is clearly the case
that there are differences among the different component parts of the intermediate middle classes
in their social and political attitudes and their propensity to action.69 At the same time, there are also
some general shared values and a common approach to change. In particular, there is a general lack
of desire for regime change, though this is also accompanied by a commitment to political reform, if
variable in focus and intensity.
The lack of a desire for regime change is not hard to understand. As Li Zhang points out, the middle
class is characterised by its ‘heightened sense of security’;70 partly, but not exclusively, because of their

60
Ethan Michelson, ‘Lawyers, political embeddedness, and institutional continuity in China’s transition from socialism’,
American Journal of Sociology 113, (2007), pp. 352–414.
61
China Statistical Yearbook 2012, Table 20-6.
62
Andrew J. Walder, Li Bobai and Donald J. Treiman, ‘Politics and life chances in a socialist regime: dual career paths into
the urban Chinese elite, 1949–1996’, American Sociological Review 65, (2000), pp. 191–209.
63
C. H. Gong, A. Leigh and X. Meng, Intergenerational Income Mobility in Urban China, IZA DP No. 4811, (2010), p. 6.
64
Christopher Buckley, ‘How a revolution becomes a dinner party: stratification, mobility, and the new rich in urban China’,
in Michael Pinches, ed., Culture and Privilege in Capitalist Asia (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 68.
65
Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy.
66
Huntington, The Third Wave, p. 74.
67
Tang Min, Dwayne Woods and Zhao Jujun, ‘The attitudes of the Chinese middle class towards democracy’, Journal of
Chinese Political Science 14, (2009), pp. 81–95.
68
Jean-Louis Rocca, ‘Power of knowledge: the imaginary formation of the Chinese middle class stratum in an era of growth
and stability’, in Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer, eds, Patterns of Middle Class Consumption (Beverly Hills, CA:
Sage, 2008), pp. 127–139; Li Chunling, ‘Sociopolitical attitude of the middle class and the implications for political tran-
sition’, in Minglu Chen and David S. G. Goodman, eds, Middle Class China: Identity and Behaviour (Cheltenham: Edward
Elgar, 2013), pp. 12–33.
69
Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism, pp. 70–84; Wang and Davis, ‘China’s new upper middle classes’; Li Chunling and Jie
Chen, ‘Democratization and the middle class in China: the middle class’s attitudes toward democracy’, Political Research
Quarterly 64, (2011), pp. 705–719.
70
Li Zhang, In Search of Paradise, p. 7.
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CHINA   11

increasing wealth and investment in housing, amongst other things, there is a fear of radical change.
Particularly for the older members of the middle classes these fears are heightened by residual concerns
from the political past. House ownership in urban China on a substantial scale only started during
the 1990s. Enterprise ownership has evolved greatly since 1992 but is still often dependent on local
institutional arrangements.71
The Party-state still plays a role in most activities that involve members of the urban middle class, and
indeed a substantial proportion of the professional and managerial middle classes owe their position
and standing to the state. Overall proximity to the Party-state determines the extent of each element
of the middle classes’ support for the current regime. Repeated surveys have demonstrated that the
closer members of the middle class are to the institutions of the Party-state, the more those individuals
do not wish to see regime change.72 To quote Jie Chen on the politics of the PRC’s middle class: ‘the
value and material bonds between the middle class and the state significantly affect the orientation
of the middle class toward democratic change’.73
In addition, it is also clear that the Party-state has acted where necessary to ensure a closer rela-
tionship with social groups that might otherwise present challenges to the regime. The Party-state’s
accommodation of private entrepreneurs and the latter’s increasing embeddedness in the political
system is a good example of this process.74 Another is the development of the Party-state’s policy
towards university teachers. At the start of the reform era, university teachers were rapidly becom-
ing dissatisfied. Compared to others with similar educational and social backgrounds their salaries
seemed to be going backwards, and many were forced to take second jobs. A small but vocal minority
were involved in reform activity during the 1980s that stepped beyond the Party-state’s acceptable
limits.75 In the wake of the events of 1989 in Beijing, that had involved both students and academic
staff in leadership positions, the government moved to improve salaries and conditions for university
teachers. Particularly during the late 1990s when university staff, as members of the state sector, were
privileged through the processes of housing reform that heavily subsidised their house purchases, a
new relationship with the Party-state was established. As Tang and Unger conclude from their survey
of university teachers during 2007–2009:
The Chinese educated middle class has, as a whole, become a bulwark of the current regime. As a consequence,
regime change or democratization should not be expected any time soon. The rise of China’s educated middle
class blocks the way.76
There remains a small group of university academics who advocate regime change in their writings
and activities, but the vast majority, including the addition of almost a million new university teachers
appointed since 1998, are regime-supporting. Many have joined the CCP, others serve in government
and state agency positions,77 though it nonetheless remains the case that they may be disproportion-
ately in favour of political reform within the current system.78
Lawyers are another element of the middle classes distinctly in favour of political reform but not
apparently seeking dramatic regime change. Lawyers certainly articulate a demand for the development
of a rule of law, and their rhetoric is occasionally extremely liberal. At the same time, lawyers are most
concerned about their own vulnerability in a system where rights between lawyers, clients and the

71
Hans Hendrischke, ‘Institutional determinants of the political consciousness of private entrepreneurs’, in Chen and
Goodman, eds, Middle Class China, pp. 135–148.
72
Wang and Davis, ‘China’s new upper middle classes’, p. 172; Jie Chen, A Middle Class Without Democracy, pp. 66–91.
73
Jie Chen, A Middle Class Without Democracy, p. 90.
74
Chen and Dickson, Allies of the State.
75
Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism, p. 72.
76
Beibei Tang and Jonathan Unger, ‘The socio-economic status, co-optation and political conservatism of the educational
middle class: a case study of university teachers’, in Chen and Goodman, eds, Middle Class China, p. 109.
77
Zheng Yongnian, ‘The party, class, and democracy in China’, in Kjeld-Erik Brodsgaard and Yongnian Zheng, eds, The
Chinese Communist Party in Reform (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 250; Wright, Accepting Authoritarianism, 2010, p. 76.
78
Li Chunling, ‘Sociopolitical attitude of the middle class and the implications for political transition’, p. 32.
12    D. S. G. GOODMAN

state are not clearly delineated, or even often knowable. Their requirement is protection of their rights
as lawyers, and the protection of others in their dealings with the state rather than regime change.79
Alongside this general acquiescence to the political system, the various components of the middle
classes have been both active in defence of their own interests and even to some extent critical (if
variably) of wider issues, such as social policy, government accountability and the role of the state
sector in economic development. A good example of the middle classes acting in defence of their own
interest has come in the development of homeowners’ movements.80 As might be expected with the
commercialisation of housing leading to new gated communities, a whole new set of relationships
has emerged involving local governments, real estate developers, homeowners and a whole range of
contractors involved in their construction and maintenance. A new political calculus has emerged in
which the house owners have necessarily had to act and to organise in order to ensure a measure of
control over the living environment that they have paid for. Rocca argues from his study of homeowners’
movements that these changes may well be more significant for political change in China than any
attempt to create a liberal-democratic revolution.81
Research into the core social values of different classes suggests that there is a range of satis-
faction and happiness with current conditions largely determined by the level of benefits received.
Unsurprisingly, there is a high correlation between those who consider themselves the beneficiaries
of the reform era and their view of the system as fair.82 This is though not a simple, linear relation-
ship. In particular, the intermediate classes, and particularly the professional and managerial middle
classes, have developed a concern with both social injustice and the extent of inequality. Those who
are more educated tend to emphasise the ‘external and unfair’ explanations of inequality.83 The injustice
of socio-political settings is a theme explored often by the middle classes, particularly those elements
who are or have been cadres or in the professions. Sun Liping of Tsinghua University is a good example,
writing for over a decade criticising not the fact of the Party-state but its excesses, the dysfunctionality
of the state sector of the economy, and the path dependence of political power.84

The middle classes and the Party-state

There can be little doubt that three decades of economic growth has delivered a rising standard of
living to most of the PRC’s population. There can also be no doubt that the middle classes, together
with an even smaller elite, have been the overwhelmingly disproportionate beneficiaries of that rising
standard of living. This should be no surprise in a reforming socialist market economy at the heart of
which is the intermediate classes’ (and the elite’s) relationship to the Party-state. The discourse of the
middle class in China acts to legitimatise not just the development of a consumer society, but also the
obvious inequalities that have increased with economic growth, and that centre on the Party-state.

79
Ethan Michelson and Sida Liu, ‘What do Chinese lawyers want? Political values and legal practice’, in Cheng Li, ed., China’s
Emerging Middle Class, p. 328.
80
Cai Yongshun, ‘China’s moderate middle class: the case of homeowners resistance’, Asian Survey 45, (2005), pp. 777–799;
‘Chen Peng weiquan yanjiu’ [‘From property rights to citizens’ rights. A study on homeowners’ rights defence in contem-
porary urban China’], Kaifang shidai [Open Times] 4, (2009), pp. 126–139.
81
Jean-Louis Rocca, ‘Homeowners’ movements: narratives on the political behaviours of the middle class’, in Chen and
Goodman, eds, Middle Class China, pp. 132–133.
82
Han Chunping and Martin King Whyte, ‘The social contours of distributive injustice feelings in contemporary China’, in
Deborah Davis and Wang Feng, eds, Creating Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2009), p. 206; Li Chunling, ‘Sociopolitical attitude of the middle class and the implications for political transition’, p. 28.
83
Han and Whyte, ‘The social contours of distributive injustice feelings in contemporary China’, pp. 204–205; Ching Kwan
Lee, ‘From inequality to inequity: popular conceptions of social (in)justice in Beijing’, in Davis and Wang, eds, Creating
Wealth and Poverty in Postsocialist China, p. 227.
84
For example: Sun Liping, ‘Jiushi niandai zhongqi yilai Zhongguo shehui jieguo yanbian de xinqushi’ [‘New trends in China’s
social structural evolution since the mid-1990s’], Dangdai Zhongguo yanjiu [Research on Contemporary China] 3, (2002),
pp. 1–20; Sun Liping, ‘Duanlie: ershi shiji jiushiniandai yilai Zhongguo shehui jieguo’ [‘Fracture: China’s social structure
since the 1990s’], in Y. Li, L. Sun and Y. Shen, eds, Dangdai Zhongguo shehui fenceng: lilun yu shizheng [Social Stratification
in Contemporary China: Theory and Evidence] (Beijing: Shehui kexue wenxian chubanshe, 2006), pp. 1–35.
 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY CHINA   13

Writing over four decades ago about the USA, Richard Parker described the middle class as a dangerous
public belief, in words that seem particularly apposite to contemporary China, despite the obvious
differences in political economy:
… the myth has been enshrined because, over the past two decades, it has helped an elite of the upper middle
class to achieve a substantial hegemony over the rest of the community, a hegemony that rarely is challenged suc-
cessfully because of the New Class’s claim to act in the interest of the whole … By naively assuming (or deliberately
pretending) that their affluence, advantages, and comforts are universal, instead of unique, and that the middle
class includes nearly everyone, they have continued the myth without considering the consequences, neither the
injustice which they perpetuate, nor the justice which they promise, but cannot fulfill.85
Parker’s moral outrage is palpable. On the other hand, the experience of the last four decades in the
USA suggests that even economic downturns (such as have subsequently and occasionally occurred in
that country) cannot change the strength of the popular belief in a universal and universalising middle
class. When, as in today’s China, that belief is allied to the political position of a dominant Party-state,
not only is economic redistribution unlikely but so too is the rapid expansion of the middle class. The
12% of the population who might currently be regarded as the intermediate middle class may well
grow but not substantially without further structural reform in the political economy. Until that time
the middle classes will remain social intermediaries in support of the Party-state, both occupationally
through their work and symbolically, through discussion of their value to society, not least as models
for emulation and of consumption.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Yingjie Guo, Jean-Philippe Béja, and an anonymous reviewer for their helpful comments
in the revision of this article.

Notes on contributor
David S. G. Goodman is Professor of China Studies at Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou; Professor in the School
of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Nanjing University; and an emeritus professor at the University of Sydney. Email:
david.goodman@xjtlu.edu.cn

Richard Parker, The Myth of the Middle Class: Notes on Affluence and Inequality (New York: Harper and Row, 1972), p. 17.
85