Talking About the Middle Class

Abstract

This book attempts to explain why the Chinese middle class plays so great a role in public debate and what Chinese society reveals of itself in this debate. The approach adopted here is very different from that used by Western and Chinese scholars who rely on a normative framework. The size and the precise characteristics of the middle class do not matter per se because they have no inherent signification in themselves beyond social imaginaries. A crucial issue in this analysis is to give a full account of the ways this “problem” emerged among the public. How is the problem of the middle class constructed?