China's Emerging Middle Class: Beyond Economic Transformation

The rapid emergence and explosive growth of China's middle class have enormous consequences for that nation's domestic future, for the global economy, and for the whole world. In China's Emerging Middle Class, noted scholar Cheng Li and a team of experts focus on the sociopolitical ramifications of the birth and growth of the Chinese middle class over the past two decades. The contributors, from diverse disciplines and different regions, examine the development and evolution of China's middle class from a variety of analytical perspectives. What is its educational and occupational makeup? Are its members united by a common identity—by a shared political vision and worldview? How does the Chinese middle class compare with its counterparts in other countries? The contributors shed light on these and many other issues pertaining to the rapid rise of the middle class in the Middle Kingdom. Contributors: Jie Chen (Old Dominion University), Deborah Davis (Yale University), Bruce J. Dickson (George Washington University), Geoffrey Gertz (Brookings), Han Sang-Jin (Seoul National University), Hsin-Huang Michael Hsiao (National Taiwan University), Homi Kharas (Brookings), Li Chunling (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Jing Lin (University of Maryland–College Park), Sida Liu (University of Wisconsin– Madison), Lu Hanlong (Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences), Joyce Yanyun Man (Peking University–Lincoln Center), Ethan Michelson (Indiana University–Bloomington), Qin Chen (Hohai University), Xiaoyan Sun (Beijing Foreign Studies University), Luigi Tomba (Australian National University), Jianying Wang (Yale University), and Zhou Xiaohong (Nanjing University).

About the Author :
Cheng Li is a senior fellow and director of research at the Brookings Institution's John L. Thornton Center. His previous books include China's Leaders: The New Generation (Rowman and Littlefield, 2001) and his edited volume China's Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy (Brookings, 2008). Li is also a director of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations, and he is the principal editor of the Thornton Center Chinese Thinkers Series, published by the Brookings Institution Press.

Review :
"There have been only a few studies to date in English that have tried to analyze the impact of the rise of the middle class in China on China's current system and to assess what kind of changes in that system the middle class might support. This book edited by Cheng Li of the Brookings Institution combines work by Chinese scholars, who have until now mainly written in Chinese, with the work of scholars located outside of China. Much of this work focuses on the most fundamental problem involved in analyzing the role of the middle class, that is, defining just who is a member of this class and who is not.... The strength [of this book] lies in the range of disagreement on what constitutes the middle class in China. Not only does one get the views of some of the major writers in the field, there is also an essay by Cheng Li that reviews much of the other literature in the field.... Overall this is a useful collection of essays that will provide a basis for getting more of the English-speaking scholarly world involved in these issues in greater depth than has been the case to date." --The Developing Economies Journal