Abstract
For many, the future of China’s political development hinges upon the role of the newly rising middle class. However, little has been done to empirically examine the characteristics of the Chinese middle class. This paper is an effort to fill in this gap. It shows that, the Chinese middle class pays greater attention to politics and engages more in informal/personal activities in dealing with conflicts with government policies or officials. However, the behavior of the middle class as an aggregate is not significantly different from that of other classes when it comes to political activities that require greater civic engagement or greater courage to confront the political system. The members of the Chinese middle class are not ready to be agents of political development in action although they hold higher democratic attitudes in mind as shown in previous studies.
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