ABSTRACT
Since the beginning of this century, a social group possessing a higher income, more education and greater occupational prestige has been emerging in China’s cities. Identified in the public media as the ‘middle class’ – even as the definition of the middle class remains in dispute – there is no doubt of the existence of this group in today’s mainland China, nor that it is expanding quickly. The group has attracted increasing attention from the public, business people and policy-makers, as well as researchers in sociology, economics and politics. Sociologists, especially, have taken a great interest in this much discussed group. However, because the middle class is newly emerging in China and its boundaries and attributes are unclear, most research has just begun to collect basic information about this group. In this chapter, an attempt is made to describe the general profile of the middle class in China in three respects: (1) the emergence of the middle class in terms of background, definition and volume; (2) the composition of the middle class; and (3) the social-political attitudes of the middle class.
