About the Author

Cheng Li is 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 he edited China's Changing Political Landscape: Prospects for Democracy (Brookings, 2008).

Product Description

As recently as two decades ago there was no distinct middle class in the People's Republic of China. Today, any meaningful discussion of China's economy, politics, or society must take into account the rapid emergence and explosive growth of the Chinese middle class. Cheng Li, a Brookings scholar and noted expert on China, leads a team of experts in detailing the origins and characteristics of this dramatic change, assessing its current effects on Chinese society and discussing what it portends for the future. Cheng Li and his colleagues, diverse in discipline and national origin, examine the development and current state of the Chinese middle class from a variety of analytical perspectives. What is the Chinese middle class' educational and occupational makeup? Are its members united by a common identity of shared values, world views, and political visions? How does the Chinese middle class compare with its counterparts in other countries? More broadly, what are the implications of urban housing reforms, changes in social mobility, and increasingly heterogeneous social stratification in a country that once officially eschewed these types of distinctions? This volume's contributors shed light on these and many other issues pertaining to the rapid rise of a middle class in the world's most populous nation. Contributors include Jie Chen (Old Dominion University), Qin Chen (Hohai University), Deborah S. 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), Cheng Li (Brookings), Li Chunling (Chinese Academy of Social Sciences), Jin 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), Luigi Tomba (Australian National University), Jianying Wang (University of Arkansas-Fayetteville), and Zhou Xiaohong (Nanjing University).