China’s middle class: an embodiment of soft power

Recently, Jack Ma published an article titled “America’s Online Sales Opportunity in China” in the Wall Street Journal, pointing out: the middle class in China is as large as the entire U.S. population and may double in seven years. This class refers to the significant number of new consumers owning considerable disposable income. As to America’s small enterprises, how the new consumers will spend money is of vital importance.

The reason why Jack Ma stresses the huge population base and consumption ability of China’s middle class is that he wants to persuade America’s small and medium-sized enterprises to enter Alibaba and China. Seeing from another perspective, China should also pay attention to the social group of middle class.

In fact, recently, the word “middle class” has weakened its implication on sociality, while highlighted its indication on China’s urbanization, consumption promotion and industrial decision.

The middle class has multi dimensions of time and space. In term of space, it is the product of urbanization. China’s urbanization has created different stages of middle class: first-tier cities represented by Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen have entered creative consumption and sharing consumption stage when individuals are the main body; while the third-tier cities are still lingering at the stage when families are the core consumption units.

In term of time, China’s middle class is different from that of America.

It has taken nearly a hundred year for America’s middle class to grow and develop, experiencing city, family, individual and society these four theme stages. Japan has also experienced similar process and each stage lasts for nearly three decades.

But, China experiences a much shorter process for development of its middle class. America and Japan’s diachronic middle class consumption feature is compressed into a synchronic Chinese time and space, which has created Chinese-style middle class – they have all features of family, individual and society these three different consumption stages.

It is just because China’s middle class steps over many development stages that results in unprecedented rich consumption demands, creates leap-type growth of China’s Internet, and leads to billionaire like “Jack Ma” for Internet is the quickest and pioneer respondent.

At first, as the main force of “core family”, China’s middle class needs color TV, refrigerators, micro-wave ovens and other traditional electric appliances. Such kind of active demands have contributed to e-commerce giant like “JD.com (Jingdong Mall) ”.

Then, as the main force of “individualized” consumption, China’s middle class has daily consumption and self-discovery consumption demands, which is just the continuous impetus for development of “Taobao”; as “individualized” consumers, they have desire to change themselves, which has contributed to “dianping.com”(group buying) and “helijia”(beauty) and also provided fertile soil for development of O2O like “ele.me”(are you hungry), “edaixi”(e laundry), etc.

Furthermore, as “social consumers” and practitioners of sharing spirit, China’s middle class has led to “WeChat”, “microblog” and other social software, and sharing preference has also endowed great vitality to taxi apps like Didi Dache and Kuaidi Dache. Meanwhile, as “social consumers”, China’s middle class are enthusiasts of focus groups and in-depth sharing, which has hastened the birth of vertical communities like “snowball” and “douban”; the environmental awareness has also been changing traditional data mining regarding income, age and gender as cluster standard, and bringing new challenges for big data servers.  

Standing from today, China’s internet has not only been respondent of its middle class, but also has become an indispensable part of their life style, as well as infrastructure of their life like electricity, tap water and expressway. It has been further upgraded from consumption satisfying tools to provider of possible life creativity. It could be said that the formation and self-confirmation of China’s middle class is inseparable from the internet (social platform, e-commerce and network knowledge sharing mechanism).

China’s enormous and diverse middle class is the basis for its internet miracle, and it is also the middle class that have created business myth like “Jack Ma”. This huge market, vast population base and thriving consumption demands are even an embodiment of China’s foreign soft power.

Published in Oriental Morning Post | 2015-6-11