Archive for ‘middle class’

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08/04/2019

China’s booming middle class creates opportunities for culture, entertainment industry: business leaders

NEW YORK, April 6 (Xinhua) — Boosted by a growing middle class population, China’s culture and entertainment industry enjoys broader prospect and is creating enormous opportunities, a group of business leaders from the United States and China said here Saturday.

Chinese society today has a growing appetite for the intellectual strength of art and music, Joseph Polisi, president emeritus and chief China officer at the Juilliard School, a renowned performing arts conservatory in the United States, said at a panel in New York.

Themed “The human connection: China and America in culture and entertainment,” the panel is part of the ongoing annual conference held by the Committee of 100 (C100), a premier U.S. organization of Chinese-American leaders from different fields.

The demand of “Chinese audiences are growing in size for western music,” he said, adding that Chinese parents have a greater request for orchestral musical training programs resulting in Chinese children being able to engage in sophisticated musical works at a young age.

Polisi, who is also an accomplished bassoonist, said that Juilliard is establishing a campus in Tianjin. Slated to open in fall 2019, the Tianjin campus offers audition-based programs on pre-college and graduate levels.

U.S. businesses have much to gain by accessing the Chinese market with the growth of the Chinese middle class and the emergence of dynamic forces including the nation’s Generation Z, small-town and rural dwellers, noted the panelists.

Their growing demand for a better life and high-quality goods will create new business opportunities.

Ben Wood, founder of Studio Shanghai Architectural Firm, who has spent 22 years in China, said bringing popular culture to China through the rapid rise of the middle class is among others behind his business success.

Gong Yu, founder and CEO of China’s leading online entertainment platform iQiyi, said his company delivers content to 200 to 300 million users daily, a remarkable achievement made in a span of only nine years thanks to the broader picture of China’s rapid development. He is confident that there will be more Chinese culture and entertainment production going global since more Chinese young people are willing to be dedicated in the industry.

Now China is home to the world’s biggest middle-income group comprised of some 400 million people, and the number is still on the rise. The country is evolving from the world’s workshop to becoming a major consumer of goods and services instead.

ource: Xinhua

Posted in bassoonist, Ben Wood, China alert, Culture, entertainment industry, founder and CEO of China's leading online entertainment platform iQiyi, Generation Z, Gong Yu, Juilliard, middle class, opportunities, Polisi, Studio Shanghai Architectural Firm, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment »

24/05/2016

China’s Middle Class Vents Over Growing List of Grievances – China Real Time Report – WSJ

The death here of a 29-year-old man in police custody—a new father and graduate of a prestigious Chinese university—has exposed growing anxieties in the country’s growing middle class, already shaken by a decelerating economy and a disparate series of high-profile incidents threatening their sense of stability.

As WSJ’s Te-Ping Chen reports:

Other wide-ranging targets of recent social-media attention include a violent string of attacks on doctors by embittered patients and their families, a demand that apartment owners in eastern China pay extra to secure the land on which their apartments were already built, confusing changes in college-entrance standards, and fatal chemical explosions wiping out homes.

Such disruptions have come as reminders that rising incomes or better education don’t automatically shield China’s expanding middle-class ranks from danger, whether physical or economic, in a society where the law can be arbitrarily enforced and justice is sometimes brutal.

“There’s a gap between expectation and reality,” said He Yunfeng, who heads Shanghai Normal University’s Institute of Knowledge and Value Sciences. “These kinds of incidents concentrated together have created a kind of panic.” Some critics have begun joking that the Chinese term for middle class— zhongchanjieji—would be better depicted by the term zhongcanjieji, or the “tragic middle class.”

Source: China’s Middle Class Vents Over Growing List of Grievances – China Real Time Report – WSJ

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27/05/2013

* As China’s middle class grows, so do its concerns

Taipei Times: “Beijing is facing increasing public pressure to deal with issues such as pollution, food safety and education driven by the 10 percent of its population who now count as middle class

W ith two cars, foreign holidays and a cook for their apartment, one Beijing family epitomizes the new middle class created by China’s decades of rapid economic growth — and its resulting worries.

Li Na, 42, is a caterer at the Beijing Zoo, and her husband, Chi Shubo, 48, works for a state-owned investment company. The couple have seen their fortunes transformed since Li arrived in Beijing 20 years ago from Shandong Province.

Then, she cycled for hours from a shared dormitory to visit her husband’s workplace. Now she commutes in a US-made car and the couple holiday with their 11-year-old daughter in Japan, South Korea and the US.

Tens of millions of other Chinese have made a similar transition. About 10 percent of China’s 1.35 billion people now count as middle class, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a figure that is set to rise to 40 percent by 2020.

However, their concerns about air pollution, food safety and China’s education system show the challenges facing the country’s newly appointed leaders, who have promised a shift away from the model of growth at all costs.

Every year, Li and her husband set a goal to improve their lives.

“We always have a plan,” Li said. “For example, this year I might want a new camera and my husband will help make that come true.”

The family’s four-bedroom apartment in a Beijing suburb was the most important purchase of their lives.

“We struggled half our lives to buy it,” Li said over a breakfast of fried eggs and bacon.

In a picture of comfortable suburban living, their daughter, who goes by the name Nancy, sprawls on a vast sofa opposite a huge flat-screen Sony television, nuzzling the family’s fluffy brown dog.

Li says her top priority is Nancy’s education. It is not a school day, but Li’s iPhone alarm rings to signal that it is time for her daughter’s first lesson.

She steers her Chevrolet Epica sedan past forests of near-identical apartment blocks to the Haidian Youth Palace, a relic of Maoist-era China which now holds classes aimed at boosting children’s creativity.

At weekends, Nancy has lessons in traditional Chinese calligraphy and a badminton class “with a private coach,” Li said.

In the past year, the young girl swapped learning the piano for a new instrument, the ocarina, a pocket-sized flute.

Nancy has only three or four hours of free time a day on weekends, Li said, as she seeks to hold her position in China’s highly competitive education system.

A glut of graduates created by the expansion of China’s university system means that the graduate unemployment rate is higher than that of the general population, making winning a place at the very best colleges ever more crucial.

Getting into a top school is also not always about ability, Li said, with cash donations sometimes involved.

“Sometimes parents need to do extra work, give out red envelopes and even then, success can depend on your contacts,” she said.

This year has bought some more worrying lessons. When thick smog blanketed northern China, sending pollution levels soaring in the capital, Nancy learned about PM2.5, the name given to invisible pollutants which can damage children’s lungs.

She reached into the pocket of her mother’s car seat and pulled out a face mask.

“My mum made me wear this every day in January and February because the PM2.5 was very bad,” she said.”

via As China’s middle class grows, so do its concerns – Taipei Times.

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