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Opinion
Middle-class nation: how China is rising to the challenge of common prosperity
- Far from turning back the clock on capitalism, Beijing is using it to help socialism amid challenges including geopolitical tensions, an ageing population and an overheated property market
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Cheah Cheng Hye is the chairman of Cheah Capital, a single-family office, and honorary chairman of Value Partners Group, a Hong Kong-listed fund management company.
Founded 100 years ago, China’s Communist Party has always branded itself as a party for workers and peasants. But it is also known for being flexible and pragmatic.
With rising wealth and improving social mobility, China is moving poorer people into the middle class, a process that the party has branded its “common prosperity” programme. The party is thus moving with its constituency and staking its brand on a successful outcome, transforming itself into a party of the middle class.
China, with a population of 1.4 billion, already has a middle class of at least 340 million, larger than the entire US population. (Some estimates put the Chinese middle class at more than 400 million, using a looser definition of the term.)
Beijing’s plans could increase the middle-class population to an estimated 500 million by 2025 and about 750 million by 2035. Put another way, it is looking for roughly half the mainland population to be middle class by 2035, from less than 30 per cent today, using a conservative definition.
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