ABSTRACT
Although the social sciences generally saw the ‘death of class’ debate in the last few decades (Beck 1992), there has been a revival in class analysis moving away from the focus on rigid class categories based on occupation, to a more flexible, encompassing look at class identity and culture as both the product and reproduc tion of social inequality (Crompton and Scott 1999; Devine and Savage 1999; Savage 2003; Tyler 2015). This shift, however, has predominantly been occur ring in examination of the Euro-American context. In the context of developing countries such as China, relatively little attention has been paid to the people’s subjective understanding and experience of class in China (Li 2010b, 2013). Yet, a degree of consensus remains in social science in general that class labels are still being utilised at an individual level, especially in relational terms (Savage 2003; Bottero 2004; Skeggs 2015). After all, without a subjective sense of belonging, any objective social category can only remain a category, and not a true ‘social group’ with class consciousness (Thompson 1963).
