The Middle Class in Neoliberal China: Governing Risk, Life-Building, and Themed Spaces by Hai Ren (review)

One of the valuable features of this study is that the author chooses to examine the complexity of contemporary Chinese society by addressing the newly emergent middle class. This class is growing rapidly, and without looking at this group any attempt to understand contemporary China would be incomplete. Two main reasons exist for the importance current scholarship has placed on the middle class. One, as mentioned in the book, arises from a desire to find a new analytical concept that is less class-based and conflict-oriented. This relates to a historical context after the beginning of China’s open-door policy and reform, in which the old theoretical framework became depoliticized and new ones were invented to understand changing Chinese society. But the term is, in fact, not neutral at all. As the author claims, using the label “middle class” to describe a large portion of Chinese population is “a state project of managing risks in Chinese societies under specific historical conditions” (p. 9), which the author labels as the rise of a neoliberal society.

The second reason why the middle class is a much-discussed topic arises from a theory popularized by political scientists and the mainstream media. This view emphasizes the democratizing potential of this social stratum, which is represented by relatively well-educated and well-paid professionals, white-collar workers, and businesspersons. The theory assumes that with growing income levels and rising educational standards, the middle class will show an ever greater desire for democracy in order to protect their political and property rights and showcase their unique life style. Although there are only a few examples to support this, such as South Korea and Taiwan, this theory has gained currency in Chinese studies as well as in the media by following the assumption that participatory politics and eventually democracy will be advanced by the rising Chinese middle class. I am wary of accepting this statement because Chinese intellectuals were ascribed the same role in the recent past, but their actual impacts on Chinese society were more complicated than depicted by some Western scholars. The democratizing role of Chinese middle class in the process of China’s great transformation remains unclear.

Instead of focusing on the political activism within the framework of a middle-class-as-democracy-advocate framework, the author pays much more attention to the consumption behaviors and norms of this newly emergent social group. The author devises “a theory of the dispositive” to address the complexity of middle-class lives in what he calls a neoliberal China. According to the author, the middle-class dispositive is a multilinear ensemble that is composed of three elements: “the distribution of power, wealth, and risk through a neoliberal economy; the distribution of the sensible through media and communication; and the distribution of values and norms through individualization” (p. 13). This ambitious framework illustrates the author’s attempt to theorize contemporary China from a new perspective.

Through the ethnographic fieldwork the author connects his theory of the dispositive to the daily consumption practices of the middle class. Once again, the author does not attempt to cover the vast topic of consumption, since it has become a marker of postindustrial and post-modern society; rather, he chooses to focus on the cultural industry as his study object. In contrast to traditional consumption that focuses on meeting a consumer’s material needs, the cultural industry provides a kind of consumption that can be simultaneously “a means of distributing culture, linking together knowledge, entertainment, participation, and taste” (p. 97). This kind of controlled consumption of cultural goods and services cultivates a middle-class consumption taste that distinguishes class members from both the extravagant consumption of the upper class and the vulgar consumption of the underclass.

The author has conducted most of his fieldwork in the Chinese Ethnic Culture Park in Beijing. It is evident that he is a skillful ethnographer, as...