A Message to China’s Twittering Class

By Zhang Wen, an intern in the English department 

“What does middle class even mean? You can scarcely afford treatment for a serious illness. You struggle to cover the cost of raising a child. If you want to buy a flat, you need to take out a huge loan. If you need to support your parents, you have nothing left for yourself. ‘Middle class’ people can’t touch the sky or stand on earth; they are hung in the middle.”

Jiqingtianxia007, Shengyang City

China’s twittering class, Jiqingtianxia007 among them, was enraged last week when the government’s top think tank, the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences classified 37% of urban Chinese as “middle-income earners.

I don’t mind being called any class. It’s just a title, right?

If you’re one of China’s middle-income earners who doesn’t want to be called “middle class”, exactly what title would you like? Working class? Lower class? You're not working in a factory, doing manual work.

Zhongchanjieji (中产阶级), the Chinese phrase for middle class, literally means “people who own middle level property”.

Are you angry at being labeled middle class by a government think tank that has no sense of your daily hardships? Like Wuhaitao185, a man from Shanghai, who complained, “I have no property at all! How can you [the Academy of Social Sciences] have made me middle class?”

If you don’t want to be part of the zhongchanjieji just because you can’t afford an apartment in Beijing, then where exactly should we be looking for China’s middle class?

Are you saying that the Academy of Social Sciences’ “middle-income earners” are “low-class livers?”

However you like to think of yourself, I’d guess that many of you live in comfortable apartments, even if you do have to share them with roommates. Do you know that many people in Beijing are still living in windowless basements? Have you ever paid a visit to the “ant tribe” beyond the edge of the city?

I’ve seen inside the basement on my university campus where the cooks and cleaners live – it was dark, damp and stagnant. I’ve seen the street behind our campus, where families live and work in a single room that serves as workshop, market stall, dining hall and bedroom. Outside their windows, fruit and vegetable sellers shout out their prices, and, at the end of the day, leave their unwanted cabbages and tomatos to rot.

If you want to be called lower class, how would you like us to classify the people who live in these slums? “Lowest” class?

You and I can scarcely afford treatment for a serious illness, but at least our employers will insure us and we have access to quality hospitals. If we want to pay for treatment, it will take up all of our savings, but many people don’t have access to the hospitals or the money to pay for treatment.

We might choose to rent flats in big cities, rather than stay in our smaller hometowns where we could afford to buy a home.

In big cities, housing is a headache, children’s education is expensive, and the traffic is terrible. If we were to move to a smaller city, we would be among the rich people there.

If, being middle class means enjoying free time ‘worry-free’, as some of you Weibo users suggest, then are there really such people in China?

What hope is there for the middle class, when China’s highest class, the likes of Hu and Wen, never stop working?

At least you have spare time to twitter about the news - many people in China have to work so hard to make ends meet that they haven’t got the energy to consider meaningless titles like “middle class”.

So don’t get so angry when you’re called “middle class!” In some sense it’s true. You’re the ones at the middle level of society.

The report didn’t say that you’re “middle class,” it just said you were a “middle income earner”. It didn’t “make you” anything. You got confused and called yourself “middle class.”

Just because you heard the word “middle”, it doesn’t imply “class”.

It’s only reasonable that a certain proportion of Chinese should be “middle-income earners.”

How can you question the iron logic of an official report on the national condition?

(Zhang Wen is a student at Beijing Foreign Studies University.)