Housing: Identity Construction Of The Chinese Middle Class Segment, With The Symbol

Social Stratification institution is always embedded in specific social-economic form and explained by property right ownership determining the character of social-economic form and by its relations with state power. Due to combined motive foundation constructed by state redistribution power and market mechanism at the background of current socialism market economy, to define middle class in China entails embedment of Double Peaks to Stratification. It is concluded that as the carrier of bridging market and state, housing reinforces its function to build up middle class for the embedment of Double Peaks to Stratifications, because in China housing is key index of social economic stratification under both institutions of market and redistribution. For the birth of middle class experiences two ways, interior generation and exterior drive, both of which have strong statistical relativity with housing classification, it can be drew through the second research path promoted by poltanski, inclusion and exclusion pattern of Chinese middle class can base on the objective explicit form of housing and has become a objective index of reinforce group cohesiveness and identity exclusion.After Chinese middle class pattern being generalized by use of housing paradigm, Chinese middle class group in transition period that can be divided into junior middle class group, Secondary middle class group and marginal middle class group is found to be a separately diversified group in type rather than a rigorously identified class group and through purely use of occupation, income and degree or subjectively identified research perspective can not describe the full landscape of Chinese middle class group; As a research paradigm linking state and market factors, housing can effectively integrate advantages and elude disadvantages of single research paradigm as occupation, income, subjective identification, degree and alike, it proves that strong statistical relativity and self-identification of middle class based on housing construction can to some extent sum up the overall paradigm of Chinese middle class group. As housing has become the major form of Chinese middle class cohesiveness and exclusiveness at present, middle class is embedding house consumption and choice into status-acquiring and group definition and set up its own identity through Isolation to maintain the group boundary. Considering the middle class'importance of keeping social stability, from the perspective to enlarge the scale of Chinese middle class and thus to uphold social stability the state should secure "dwellers have their house" for low-income class, make sure to-be middle class "dwellers Satisfies their housing conditions, construct the system of "class harmony", get out of the trouble of house consumption class rupture, better social security, carry out the second house reform.