Flowers,the New Middle Classes And Modern China

In the modern world system,horticultural reform helped the modern market re-affirm the value of land and agriculture,brought production advantages to contemporary countries,and consequently led to superiority on their commercial,financial,military,and political sides,making horticultural reform an important path for the modernization of contemporary countries.Under the rapid transformation of modern social structure since the end of the 18th century,and dominated by the moderate liberal ideology,the middle classes is becoming a key force in maintaining social stability and balancing social structure.And flower consumption,a symbolic practice of middle-class people’s ideology,has shaped into part of the middle-class lifestyle.Looking at the global history of the floricultural reform and flower consumption,middle-class people’s ideology is both the productive drive of all the many floricultural reforms and the cultural motivation of their growing consumption of flowers.The dominant impact of the middle-class people’s ideology on the modern world-system since the mid-19th century has made the production and consumption of flowers inseparable.Tracing back to the 1980s,the emergence of the Chinese middle classes and the reforming of floriculture was almost in the same period,which also empirically supports the above-mentioned worldwide trends in flower production and consumption.In the context of this observation,the study dives into the production,consumption and ideology of flowers in Yunnan province using a multi-sited ethnographic approach.The study found that with the birth and rise of the emerging middle classes in China,the middle-class ideology it undertook brought about a huge demand for flower consumption,promoted the formation of a modern flower market,and ultimately promoted the large-scale development of floricultural reform in the vast Chinese rural society represented by the local rural society in Yunnan.Besides,floricultural reform has generated high output value of the land,and remarkably increased the economic income of the farmers,allowing them to stick to the land rather than migrating for work,which greatly eased the large loss of rural labor and prevented the rural society from being wrapped up in the torrent of industrialization and urbanization triggered by the modern country.Hence,compared with the problematic facilitation of the industrialization and urbanization that has divorced from reality and thus caused various social issues,the path of agricultural modernization,represented by horticultural reform,may be a vital counterpart to realize the revitalization of the rural society,the development of the frontier,and even the modernization and transformation of Chinese society.In this process,the middle classes not only shaped its own unique lifestyle through flower consumption,but also completed the reproduction of the lifestyle.In terms of flower consumption,the individualistic ideology featured "modern love"and "self-pleasing" has prevailed among the new middle classes in contemporary China.In holiday spending cycles,flower consumption can be seen as a metaphor for the middle-class’ expression of "modern love".This idea,especially popular among the young age,has even shaped the domestic flower industry,creating a new wave in contemporary Chinese society;Out of the holiday spending cycles,normal flower consumption becomes a practice of "self-pleasing" of the middle classes,which,to speak more specifically,has the combination of "equality","nature","tranquility",and"freedom" as its connotation.Together with the idea of "modern love",they constitute a key representation of the individualistic ideology of the middle classes in contemporary China.In addition,it is worth noting that in the thousands of years long history of the Chinese civilization,despite the alternation of generations,the relevance between people’s consumption of flowers and their philosophy of life has been inherited,being a notable feature that distinguishes flower consumption in the Chinese society from that in the Western society.The reason why "flower" spans time and space,symbolizing hierarchy in pre-modern society while expressing equality in modern society,is because"flower" as a sacrificial offering represents the vitality of both the warrior group and the middle classes.The consumption of flowers as a lifestyle is a self-determined fate of the ancient warrior group and the contemporary middle classes.