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Goodman (2008) has written how the economic growth of China has sharpened the divide between the rich and the poor and there are only extremes with the absence of any sizeable middle calls population. The author argues that during the cultural revolution and the reign of Mao, the wealthy landowners and the bourgeois were turned out and their wealth reverted to the state. Managers who formed the middle class managed the industries and the wealth. The author reports that teachers, lawyers, economists and other intellectual people were purged and either abused or sent to the farms for reduction. After the economic reforms of the 1980’s, this middle class managers, lawyers, teachers and other professionals turned entrepreneurs and decided to set up their own units for manufacturing. By dint of their labour and hard work, these people moved up the hierarchy to become successful and rich and represent the rich and the bourgeois. The author gives examples to state this argument and mentions:
“In the Hangzhou area, one village transformed its machinery workshop, which had access to wire products, into a production line for using wire to produce elaborate gift cards for the Japanese market. It was soon so successful that the production line became a large-scale factory and the village ceased agricultural production. In Yuci (in Shanxi Province) another village agricultural machinery workshop turned to aluminium radiator production; in Ymgchuan (also in Shanxi) surrounded by coal-mining, coal by-products, particularly plastics, were produced. These enterprises and their development were led by local individuals, often the former workshop manager or some other level of local leaders who was able to mobilise their fellow villagers. Though technically managers and not owners of the TVEs, many behaved economically, socially and politically as if they. were.” (Goodman, 2008).
Goodman tends to define middle class as staid people who are content to work at their jobs and lead a comfortable life with their wages.
Sang (2006) has provided cross-cultural representations of China where she mentions interview with people from different walks of life. The author says that it is the “cult of the individual,” the individuated subject and consumer-actor, that has been the most egregious feat of social engineering in reformist China”. Many of the interviewees talk about the corrosive changes that have been wrought on the professional ethics and attitudes of men and women long nurtured by the socialist state and the public purse. These people lie between the bourgeois and the working class and while they are technically the middle class, some tend to be different. One of the interviwed persons Diannao chong belong to a brasher and more self-assured generation. This young man, working in Beijing’s equivalent of Silicon Valley, is proud of both his commercial shrewdness and his nation’s ancient civilization while pointedly dismissive of his parents’ generation. He expresses an acute awareness of the humiliations his country has suffered as a result of technological backwardness, political upheavals, and imperialist avarice. His message is as unambiguous as it is unapologetic: “We’re here. We’re mean. Get used to I”t. To a great extent he represents the new generations, products of the single child policy and who are educated and have sufficient salary and some of them are entrepreneurs.
Sang (2006) mentions a report “Millionaires on the Mainland” by China Business Times in which the paper reports that anyone with the right mindset and skills can make money and there are many mansions with all the luxury accessories. He mentions the story of the clothes seller who was a poor trader and then grew to importing second hand clothes and is now a big time trader. The point that Sang is trying to make is that China has lots of opportunities and people have the opportunity to grow out of poverty. To a great extent this supports Goodman’s theory that there are no middle class people in China.
References
- Goodman David SG, 2008. Why China has no new middle class Cadres, managers and entrepreneurs Chapter 1, in The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives. Rutledge; 1 edition.
- Sang Ye. 2006. China Candid: The People on the People’s Republic. Edited by Geremie R. Barmé, with Miriam Lang. University of California Press..
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