Research On The Consumption Patterns Of China's New Middle Class In Economic Transition

The beginning of China's economic reform in 1978 has made globally recognized achievement. Without the reform and opening-up has given china an entirely new look. From the countryside to the cities and from the economic to other areas, the process of sweeping reform has unfolded with irresistible momentum. From the coastal areas to areas along the Yangtze River and the borders, and from the eastern to the central and western regions, the door has been resolutely opened to the outside world. This great undertaking of reform and opening up, never seen before in history, has greatly stimulated the enthusiasm of hundreds of millions of Chinese people and brought about China's historic transformation from a highly centralized planned economy to a robust socialist market economy, and from a closed or semi-closed state to all-round opening up. Today the country's achievements in political, cultural and social development enabled its people to move steadily toward prosperity and happiness.As China's economy has soared at consistently astonishing rates, China's social structure also has undergone dramatic changes since the inception of sweeping reforms and the open-door policy thirty years ago. The open-door policy and the new guideline to"let some people become rich first"in the past three decade fostered an environment conducive to the emergence of a new middle class. Obviously the growing new middle class in china is an inevitable historical consequence on path of national modernization.According to the latest research, the members of the new middle class generally enjoy a comfortable life, have stable employment and hold a positive attitude toward society. They are the stable force of the society and the mainstay of the market. The increase of the economic standing in the affluent stratum will undoubtedly exert profound influence on China's social and political life. But the most conspicuous change is that the emergence of a rapidly expanding new middle class is shaping new consumption patterns, reshaping personal values and lifestyles, and determining the strategies of foreign countries for which this segment of society is their primary target. As Western culture and customs have gained influence among the new middle class, Cultural change and economic prosperity prompted the rise of consumerism and has pushed the China's new middle class into a mass consumption society.In contrast with a previous ethic of austerity encouraged by the state, consumerism is now sanctioned because the new middle class ability to consume is regarded as an index of progress. How these drastic changes have occurred in the short span of a quarter of a century? How they become the vanguard of social and cultural change, embracing rationality, science, and secularism, leading china out of its tradition, superstition and ignorance in china's economic transition? How those people carving out a new consumption patterns which they explicitly locate, in language and material practice, between the above and the below class? Maybe we can't give an exact judgment about how the entire process took place? To answer these questions, we should go a little bit into the history to trace the origin of these people. Because it is an indisputable fact that the new middle class of china has to bear the blunt of market-oriented reform.The major interest of this paper is tried to understand the new middle class of china and focuses on the patterns of those people consumption. Firstly, to describe the cultural contexts and historical processes out of which a new middle-class culture has emerged in China; Secondly, drawing on economic and social insights, to offer a new approach to conceptualizing the new middle class; Thirdly, to provide a detailed account of the practices that make up contemporary patterns of china's new middle class consumption. In the study, traditional economic and social methods such as econometric analysis, statistic analysis, participant observation, in-depth interviewing utilized in this paper.In this paper, by analyzing consumption patterns of the new middle class, we attempted to identify consumption patterns is an important visual angle to differentiate class structure. And we also assessed and explored the impact of socio-economic forces on consumption patterns. Specifically, we built a proprietary database of information on the new middle class's consumption structure and an ECM model of their consumer behavior by using of primary data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China and other sources.In general, research on the consumption patterns of china's new middle class has been one of the most active and important areas of scholarly investigation. The empirical findings indicated that the drastic changes in socio-economic structure inevitably brought about corresponding changes in consumption patterns of the new middle class. We ought to admit that these changes are consequential and significant: their consumption patterns will help cultivate new growth points in domestic consumption as an important signal of maturity in Chinese society; they can help ease contradiction and even conflict between the upper stratum and lower stratum; the moderate and conservative ideology of the new middle class tends to be accepted as the mainstream ideology of a society and thus helps safeguard social stability by forcing out extremism. We trustfully believe that the new middle class will become the backbone of society with the socioeconomic environment for fostering the expansion of China's new middle class is mature.