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Middle Class Politics

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The Making of the Chinese Middle Class

Abstract

At the beginning of the 2000s, the media, the intellectuals, and the ruling classes all pointed out that the Chinese middle class should give birth to so-called “political modernity,” that is, to further democratization. For the ruling classes, the middle class is a quiet class: demanding in terms of living standards but reasonable in terms of political change. However, a certain number of intellectuals and journalists expect more from the middle class. They hope it will compel the government to undertake more significant political reform. The analysis of recent social movements allows us to explore the reality of these expectations and deal with democratization in terms of the emergence of new technologies of domination.

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Rocca, JL. (2017). Middle Class Politics. In: The Making of the Chinese Middle Class. The Sciences Po Series in International Relations and Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-39339-5_5

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