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China's economic recovery
EconomyChina Economy

China’s vulnerable middle class must ‘work harder’ to maintain status quo, Beijing seeks urgent fix for indispensable cohort

  • China’s crucial middle class, an oft-cited group of 400 million, may shrink in the absence of a strong economic recovery
  • Beijing sees the group as crucial for economic growth and social stability, and to counter external challenges, amid the bumpy post-Covid recovery

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China’s middle class continues to face economic pitfalls that threaten to wipe out wealth. Illustration: Davies Christian Surya
He Huifengin Guangdong

For China’s middle class, things have never looked harder as they reflected on 2023 and peered ahead to the second year of what should be a post-pandemic economic recovery in 2024.

No signs have yet emerged to upend their frustration as the property market meltdown and free-falling stock market have continued to wipe out their wealth.

The troubles are endangering the world’s largest middle class, as economists have warned that the group that numbers an oft-cited 400 million may shrink in the absence of a strong economic recovery.

A continued decline would also threaten Beijing’s efforts to double the size of China’s middle-income group as part of its common prosperity push, which lies at the centre of the ambition to become an advanced economy by the middle of the century.
Some are faced with unstable jobs, and under threat of dropping out of the middle-income group
Economic Daily

While there is no definition of the middle class in China, the commonly used phrase of middle-income group is defined by the National Bureau of Statistics as a three-person household earning between 100,000 yuan (US$14,000) and 500,000 yuan a year.

In a rare warning, an editorial commentary by the state-run Economic Daily last month noted the risk of a declining middle-income group, and called for “necessity and urgency” to foster its growth.

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