ABSTRACT
Having studied the rise and features of the middle classes in Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, the eight most economically dynamic societies in East and Southeast Asia in the 1990s, the terms Taiwanese middle class, Korean middle class, Hong Kong middle class, Singaporean middle class and Malaysian middle class, or even East and Southeast Asian middle classes all automatically come to mind when I write about the middle classes in these two regions in Asia (Hsiao 1993, 1999, 2003, 2006). Witnessing the rapid rise of China’s economy and the transformed Macao came into the global economic stage in the twenty-first century, I have become curious about whether or not there exists an equally meaningful concept of Chinese middle classes across the borders of the four dominantly ethnic Chinese societies of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macao and China, or even the fifth one of Singapore.
