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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