Embracing the middle class

Abstract

The People’s Republic of China is probably the first Communist Party-state to explicitly and positively advocate the encouragement and growth of the middle class. A middle-class discourse is seen as the solution to a number of problems by the Chinese Communist Party: encouraging economic growth and consumption, legitimating inequality, and ensuring the continuity of the Party-state. Research both inside and outside China throws doubt on the size and capacity of the middle class as a social structure: growing the discourse of the middle class is almost certainly more important than growing the middle class itself. More limited in numbers than the Chinese Communist Party might suggest, the professional, managerial, and entrepreneurial middle classes are all the same central to the Party-state’s operations. This is a main reason why researchers see these middle classes as more regime supporting than advocating regime change, as the evidence of middle-class growth in other countries might suggest. On the other hand, research has revealed that they often campaign for more specific changes and social justice and are quite often vocal in defense of the interests of themselves and others.