Being Middle Class in China

Identity, Attitudes and Behaviour

Ying Miao

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781317284734
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Many studies of the Chinese middle class focus on defining it and viewing its significance for economic development and its potential for sociopolitical modernisation. This book goes beyond such objective approaches and considers middle class people's subjective understanding and diverse experiences of class. Based on extensive original research including social surveys and detailed interviews, the book explores who the middle class think they are, what they think about a wide range of socioeconomic and sociopolitical issues, and why they think as they do. It examines attitudes towards the welfare state, social inequality, nationalism, relations with foreign countries and opinions on many social controversies, thereby portraying middle class people as more than simply luxury consumers and potential agents of democracy. The book concludes that a clear class identity and political consciousness have yet to emerge, but that middle class attitudes are best characterised as searching for a balance between old and new, the traditional and the foreign, the principled and the pragmatic.

1 Class analysis in comparative perspective

For a long time, research on class and social stratification has been mostly concerned with two concepts: class structure, which includes class location and class relations; and class agency, which incorporates class interests, consciousness, formation, practices and struggle. Those who take the structuralist approach, from classical theorists like Marx and Weber to the more recent Nuffield researchers of Goldthorpe and Marshall, suggest that social relations are rooted in division of labour and employment relations, and recently, occupational locations (Marx 1845; Davis and Moore 1945; Goldthorpe et al. 1969; Marshall 1997; Wright 2005). On the other hand are those who focus on the intentionality, knowledgeability of the self-conscious agents and their ability to construct, negotiate or struggle against the social world they are in, usually in the form of class culture (Bourdieu 1984; Agger 1991; Skeggs 2004; Bennett et al. 2009; Paton 2014). As such, scholars often argued over the class structure/agency duality and its implications of class determinism versus class voluntarism. Gidden’s structuration theory attempted to reconcile this dualism by arguing that structure and agency are intertwined (Giddens 1981), and indeed a substantial amount of research has illustrated how forms of collective actions can be sustained by drawing on class resources by agents (Lash and Urry 1987) and can be explained by the class capacities that allow them to pursue their interests (Savage 2005).

However, in the latter half of the twentieth century, the transition between industrial to financial capitalism in the Euro-American context has led to the increase of individualisation and the decline of working class culture, which have caused some to believe that class is no longer either relevant or able to produce taken-for-granted ways of behaviour, values and views (Beck 1992; Pakulski and Waters 1996; Beck 2002; Atkinson 2010). Nevertheless, inequalities in life chance, income, health persist, and economic inequalities continue to be implicated in wider social, cultural and political divisions. Rather than continuing to find new ways to define class in a precise and contained manner, researchers have paid increasing attention to processes of culture, lifestyle and taste, and argued that economic inequalities (arising out of market processes) and social inequalities (as a result of cultural and sociopolitical differences) need to be considered together. In particular, class processes can be seen as operational, as long as economic and cultural practices work together to reproduce inequality and hierarchy, regardless of whether people are conscious of class issues or receptive to class identities (Devine 1998; Devine and Savage 1999; Bottero 2004; Tyler 2015). Indeed, class is now seen as ‘modes of differentiation rather than types of collectivity’ (Savage 2000; Crompton 2006).

By comparison, research on social stratification in China has also experienced a decline in the 1980s, albeit due to different contextual reasons. Whereas class lost its ideological significance in the West due to new developments in modern industrial societies such as the advent of pluralism and individualisation, class lost its discursive legitimacy in China after the state consciously abandoned the idea of class struggle as it chose to adopt marketisation and partial privatisation. There followed a period where the idea of class was both rejected as a political tool as well as a social reality, and interest in the study of social stratification was renewed only as a result of the rapidly evolving and deepening inequalities brought on by the market reform. Among the factors shaping China’s new socioeconomic contours are both distinct features belonging to China’s market socialism, such as the household registration system (Huang, Guo and Tang 2010), the cadre versus professional dualism (Zang 2008), as well as familiar influences of consumption (Hanser 2008; Davis and Wang 2009) and individualisation (Halskov Hansen and Svarverud 2010) that also manifest the process and characteristics of China’s social stratification in distinct forms.

From the beginning of the twenty-first century onwards, there has been increasing attention paid to the rise of the middle class in developing countries, China chiefly among them. Not only has the Chinese state continuously emphasised the importance of the middle class as a part of its expanding rhetoric regarding a ‘well-off society’ and the prosperous ‘China Dream’, Western commentators and business analysts alike have been eager to highlight the significance of the rising urban affluent populace, both in terms of its consumption power and its sociopolitical role. In pursuit of this middle class, scholars have encountered similar problems to the study of class in general in the Euro-American context: in terms of its definitional criteria, its characteristics and its wider political implication (Li 2010a). Some contest that the middle class are more of a rhetoric than a sociopolitical reality (Goodman 2012), or that there is no difference between the middle class or the ‘middle stratum’ (Li 2008c). Others point to the heterogeneity of the ‘middle classes’, how individuals in similar middle class occupations can have extremely different educational attainment levels and family backgrounds because of historical and political reasons (Zhu 1998; Li 2008a), and how the professionals, managers, cadres, even professors and lawyers all have the potential to exhibit distinct characteristics (Bian et al. 2005; Tang and Unger 2013; Wu and Zhang 2015). Nearly every researcher agrees that income is a problematic criterion for defining middle class, but there is little agreement over what is better or more feasible (Zhang 2008; Li 2010b). Like similar debates that have happened in the Western context, scholars and commentators alike argue over whether middle class are inherently conservative by virtue of their socioeconomic status and sociopolitical ties with the state (Tomba 2009; Lu 2010; Chen 2013; Goodman 2014b), or whether their education and contact with the outside world will lead them to demand greater political roles and even democratisation. Among the plethora of studies, the only fairly uncontested understanding about the Chinese middle class seems to be that the middle class have heterogeneous social compositions, have strong ties to the party-state, and cannot be simply defined by income alone. Although structure and agency both exist, they are also ambiguous. To paraphrase the words of E. P. Thompson, the middle class in China may very well be a ‘happening’.

Thus, we come back to the question posed in the first chapter of this book. How can two individuals who do not recognise each other as class peers, despite having similar socioeconomic statuses and at times ascribe similar class labels to themselves, come together to shed light on this so-called Chinese middle class? The key is that despite the fragmentary and heterogeneous nature of their social composition and identities, there is a remarkable degree of continuity in their mode of differentiation, internalisation and exclusion of their class identities and experience. Sometimes the nuanced distinctions in their class experience affects their attitude as members of subjective classes, sometimes they come together and use similar logics of differentiation and exclusion that see them emerge as a more cohesive middle class. The way they continuously negotiate, balance and extrapolate the social world that they inhabit is both the result of their overall socioeconomic position and is illustrative of their daily experience of being middle in the ‘Middle Kingdom’.

Middle class Ningbo

Located in the affluent southern coastal area of China, Ningbo was one of the first cities to open up under the Treaty of Nanking (1842), and have since remained an important port city in the region. According to the Ningbo Statistical Yearbook, the urban population of Ningbo in 2012 is just over 2.2 million, of whom 1.4 million are registered as non-agricultural. For the same year, the average annual disposable income per capita of urban residents is ¥38,043, while the average total expenditure for consumption per capita is ¥22,887. Comparatively, the average annual disposable income per capita among the 36 major cities in China, which is ¥27,319 in 2011, and the average total expenditure for consumption per capita among these major cities is ¥19,283. There are half a million private cars registered in the urban area of Ningbo alone, and approximately 1.3 million residents are connected to the Internet (Ningbo Statistics Bureau 2012). Among the 1.7 million residents who are employed, more than 30% have had higher education, and 15% have received an undergraduate degree or above. Famous for being home to many ‘Confucian merchants’ – merchants who have an affinity for learning and aspired to be the Confucian ‘gentleman’ in their conduct – and housing the Tianyi Pavillion, the oldest existing library in China, Ningbo is a city known for its entrepreneurial spirit and education. With a per capita output of gross domestic product (GDP) of ¥112,653, Ningbo counts among the ‘booming middle class city’ as outlined both in the state rhetoric and in commentator’s eyes.

It was not difficult to find a sample of respondents in Ningbo who befit the objective middle class category. By limiting the survey to those with Internet connectivity, and distributing the survey among online communities and instant messaging groups of large private cooperate enterprise, a medium-sized real-estate firm, a medium-sized insurance firm, and a regional car owners club, the overwhelming majority of the respondents returned can be called middle class by at least one of the objective criteria (Li and Zhang 2008a).

Table 1.1 Objective criteria for middle class status or membership

		Survey part I (%) (n=181)	Survey part II (%) (n=258)
Income (¥ per annum)	>87.5 k (high income)	49 (89/181)	37 (96/258)
	60−87.5 k	14 (25/181)	20 (52/258)
	35−60 k	20 (37/181)	21 (54/258)
	<35 k (low income)	5 (9/...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Acknowledgements
• An illustrated glimpse into middle class life in Ningbo
• Introduction
• 1 Class analysis in comparative perspective
• 2 Social identity of the middle class
• 3 Between the state and the market
• 4 Middle class attitude towards sociopolitical affairs
• 5 Nationalism among the middle class
• Conclusion: the middle class in the Middle Kingdom
• Appendix
• Bibliography
• Index