ABSTRACT
The prime beneficiaries and the agents of the rapid economic growth in the
People’s Republic of China (PRC) since the early 1980s have been a whole
range of new entrepreneurs who in large and small ways; in retail, manu-
facturing and services; have invented, invested, owned, and managed their
way to varying degrees of wealth. Since the late 1980s and early 1990s, these
entrepreneurs have been increasingly described as China’s new ‘middle class’
or ‘middle classes’ by academic and more general media commentators
outside the PRC (Glassman 1991; White, Howell and Shang 1996; Goodman 1999a; Lardy 2007). In the process a parallel is clearly being implied
between the PRC’s socio-economic development since the late 1970s and the
consequences of industrialisation in Europe over a longer period starting at
the beginning of the nineteenth century.
