ABSTRACT
Mention of the ‘new rich’ in urban China is likely to evoke images of ostentatious wealth and fast-talking entrepreneurs; and mention of their ‘culture’ or of ‘cultural constructions’ is likely to bring to mind the garish status symbols favoured by the newly wealthy sections of China’s urban population-portable telephones, luxury imported cars, nightclubs and expensive restaurants, foreign liquor. But any attempt to explain the cultural dimensions of the emergence of a class of ‘new rich’ in present-day urban China must attempt to look past familiar images and address the conundrum of the relationship between culture and social change, between the social features of the new wealthy elite and the objects, activities and practices that define their emergent identity. Like a Möbius strip, culture-the attitudes, values and beliefs expressed in material life and social organisation-and changes in society and economy seem to lead to endless loops of mutual causation (Lamont and Lareau 1988). In this chapter, I hope to suggest how we can better disentangle the links between the ‘cultural construction’ of the new rich and their socioeconomic position in urban Chinese society by focusing on the social structures or networks which mediate between broader economic and social changes and the lives of individuals. In attempting to relate cultural processes to social change, we can easily fall into the habit of treating culture either as a homogeneous, unitary thing ‘owned’ by all members of a class, or as a set of psychological dispositions, such as entrepreneurial values, locked inside the heads of its possessors.
