The Middle Class in Neoliberal China: Governing Risk, Life-Building, and Themed Spaces

After decades of reconfiguration and redirection of the Chinese economy, society, and politics toward neoliberalism since the late 1970s, China has become not merely one of the world'¬"s fastest growing economies but also one of the most socially polarized states. Facing rapidly rising risks caused by this historical transformation, a new normative politics of imagining and developing a stable middle class society has been emerging in China. This book focuses on three major questions: How does the Chinese state address problems of national sovereignty and political representation to create the middle class both as a legitimate category of the people and as an ideal norm of citizenship? How does the recognition of the middle class norm take place in the practice of everyday life? And what kind of risks does the middle class politics consequentially generate not only for aspired middle class subjects but also for the disenfranchised? In this book Hai Ren looks at a set of practices, bodies of knowledge, measures, and institutions that aim to manage, govern, control, and orient the behaviors, gestures, and thoughts of Chinese citizens. The Middle Class in Neoliberal China contributes not only to the understanding of the development of the middle class in China but also to the scholarly debate over the relationship between governmental apparatuses, subjectification, and life-extension.