ABSTRACT
Studies of contemporary Pacific Asia have often been concerned with the economic and political position of the new rich and the middle class. Within the economic sphere, the focus has been on how the middle class contributes to the development of the burgeoning Asian economies. Within the political sphere, the focus has been on the emergence of a civil society and the middle class as an agent of democratisation. In this literature, members of the middle class are seen as representing a basically new development. Their emergence signifies the breakthrough of modern society, whereby Asia will eventually converge with the West. The modernity and morals of the middle class stand at the centre of analysis, since it is inferred that a similarity in cultural tastes in East and West will bring about the convergence of the two. The economic strategies and political thinking of the middle class mark them off from the ‘non-modern’ layers of ‘traditional’ society. Everything new and good is credited to the middle class; what is traditional represents peasant values and must be dissolved. In short, the picture of the middle class is close to mythical: a vague and delightful cliché about the modernity of the new rich, and not much more.
