More and More Young People Keep Finding New Ways to Spend, While Insisting: “You’re the Middle-Class One — You and Your Whole Family”

“Middle class” sounds like an affected word, but there’s another name for it: “consumption upgrading” — sounds much better, doesn’t it?

Taking pride in loving to run;

Skipping the usual steamed vegetable buns on weekends to go out for brunch;

Buying bread at an imported-goods supermarket, or at the French-run shop on the corner;

Is this the middle class?

When it comes to the term “middle class,” we keep seeing definitions like this one:

In July 2016, an article in The Economist put Chinese middle-class households at an annual income of 76,600 to 286,000 yuan, and said about 225 million people in China met the standard.

Definitions of China’s middle class like this one draw plenty of complaints. One common objection: an income anywhere from 70,000 to 280,000 yuan can buy wildly different standards of living. Another: even at 280,000 yuan a year, if young people still can’t afford an apartment in Beijing, Shanghai or Guangzhou and aren’t living well enough, do they count as middle class?

Thorstein Veblen’s The Theory of the Leisure Class called this particular group, thrown up at a certain stage of economic development, the “leisure class.” C. Wright Mills’ White Collar: The American Middle Classes pointed out that the new middle class generally does mental work, and that a good many of its jobs are professional and technical.

So today, the middle class may be easier to define accurately through consumption habits and ways of living.

On the level of consumption habits, “having money” isn’t crudely a matter of income crossing some line, or owning an apartment and a car; it means having no absolute notion of “saving money” when you’re after quality of life. And “having leisure” doesn’t mean never working late and vacationing all day; it means having spare time to spend, and to talk about spending.

The term “middle class” turns up more and more often. At the same time — ever since the concept appeared — the middle class has been a standing target for mockery. In this telling, the middle class is a crowd of poseurs: they take pride in loving to run, never eat breakfast on weekends but only brunch, buy their bread at an imported-goods supermarket or the French-run corner shop, and are obsessed with organic food and wellness regimens... Sometimes, with only an affordable-luxury budget but a craving for “real luxury goods,” they’ll lower themselves to shop on secondhand websites.

Veblen linked “conspicuous consumption” to this group in much the same way, writing that they “want to exceed, in their consumption, what is needed for material enjoyment,” and that “the class just one rung above one’s own is always the class every class envies and strives to be admitted into.”

The middle class has always carried a whiff of pretension, so people put in that box, right after saying “I love running” or “I love pour-over coffee,” often rush to add — as if to shake the label off — “I’m not middle class!”

Today the threshold for a middle-class life has dropped; at the same time, under a barrage of marketing in every form, more and more people want to raise their quality of life in middle-class ways.

On Zhihu, threads like “which products have improved your quality of life” always collect upvotes; plenty of KOLs (key opinion leaders) deal in consumption, and a KOL usually doubles as a “shop recommender,” where even an offhand recommendation ends up building a business steering people toward purchases. And friends now have one more way of talking to each other: “sharing shopping carts and wish lists.”

Over the past year, in QDaily’s reporting and in QDaily Research Lab surveys, we’ve found that young people’s consumption habits are becoming more and more middle-class too.

A Boston Consulting Group report says two groups in China are increasing their spending. The first is the upper middle class and the well-off in smaller cities. The second is millennials (the two overlap somewhat). And millennials’ spending power will keep rising, to twice that of people over 35.

Many young people, the first generation of only children, are at the stage where feeding themselves feeds the whole family: no big outlays (especially when savings are nowhere near a car or an apartment), and not much to worry about. Even when the cash in their hands isn’t much, and a salary is just money passing through — “the moment it lands it goes to the landlord and the credit-card company” — that doesn’t stop them from enjoying life and improving it. Their incomes may not match the traditional definition of the middle class, but in some areas their consumption habits and tastes match the middle class’s, or run ahead of them.

Consumption has always carried social and emotional weight. Even young people who refuse to be sorted and labeled can’t get around the need to “show who they are” when they buy particular things. We have no intention of ranking consumption habits here. But even though it’s all just spending money, different habits get assigned different meanings.

The middle-class consumption habits below are also the habits of a lot of young people today:

Saying no to mainstream consumption, going niche

The QDaily Research Lab once ran a survey titled “Which niche find that you loved at first sight ended up a mass hit?” It drew 13,137 responses, everyone expressing, to one degree or another, their heartbreak at watching a favorite discovery turn into something everybody has.

From the idea that scarcity makes things precious, to contempt for nouveau-riche taste, “niche” has always been tied to sophistication. Today it means not following the crowd, having your own views and a distinctive taste. In contemporary society, what you buy has less to do with money than with choice and taste. So the middle class sometimes asserts itself by refusing — by choosing niche goods. Besides self-expression, “niche” also reflects a segmented market: people’s demands on the specific qualities of a product have grown finer.

1. With 5,000 yuan to spend on a bag, they lean away from brands everyone knows, like LV, and toward an independent designer they found on Instagram. Same with clothes.

2. Travel, of course, has to go deep. Rather than crowding into the same popular sights and staying at one of the same few five-star chains, it matters more to find “little-known” attractions and food, to enjoy a distinctive guesthouse at a comparable price, and to talk with locals (this also rules out the old hitch-a-ride, cadge-a-meal style of budget backpacking).

3. Figures from the U.S. fragrance market show that young people don’t like mass-market or celebrity perfumes. A brand nobody has heard of is cooler than a scent you smell on every street. Euromonitor data show that by 2020 the mass fragrance market will shrink 15%, while the $6.6 billion artisanal and prestige market will grow 18%.

4. Fine to watch movies at the multiplex, but not only movies at the multiplex. There are film festivals too — next to blockbusters, discussing silent films and black-and-white films feels more like a meeting of souls, more of a thrill.

5. The technical ones, besides IMAX, may also be into watching Blu-rays on a projector.

6. For ratings, besides Douban, there’s IMDb and Metacritic.

7. Behind “niche” lies the pursuit of an interesting life, and “interesting,” as the word is used now, carries a note of contrarianism toward the mainstream; young people want to prove through what they buy that they are interesting people. Pinecone Life, an app for the “young middle class” that lists exhibitions, theater events and wine and coffee classes, was featured by Apple’s App Store a month after launch.

8. And sometimes eating at a street stall becomes a middle-class fashion. It shows you’ve reached a new level: once most of the people in your social circle are middle class, you have to find another way to prove how niche you are.

Not just keen on consuming, but on “researching consumption”

Just as “well educated” is one of the middle class’s defining traits, in this enthusiasm for researching consumption people with middle-class habits care less about how much they spent than about the reasoning behind the purchase.

1. In a QDaily Research Lab survey titled “Which martial-arts sect do you belong to when you buy makeup and skincare?”, the biggest share — 29.4% — were the “researchers,” who read every skincare review and pick a product apart before buying, ahead of those who love “organic, plant-based, all-natural” (16%) and those easily talked into a purchase (15.8%).

1. Whatever they’re buying, they read the reviews first, and with more complicated products they’re all the more fixated on how the thing actually works. They may not know any chemistry, but they want to work out exactly how to choose between shampoos with different ingredients.

2. Researching consumption makes for a more careful, more considered life. They never resist adding to their lives: they’re more likely to eat by a daily fat-loss, muscle-gain plan that balances nutrients; they don’t believe in traditional Chinese medicine but are keen to work out how to buy every kind of imported supplement; and because they know what PM2.5 does, they follow doctors’ advice on air purifiers and personal protective gear to the letter.

3. That enthusiasm also shows up as a love of making their own lives “smart.” They water plants, drink tea and brush their teeth under the precise control of apps and matching gadgets. Even the taste of food needs tests and metrics. Penguin Eating & Drinking Guide, a WeChat official account aimed at “people who want quality of life,” which sent people out to taste-test 300 bags of potato chips and 28 bowls of eel rice, gained 50,000 followers in one month after it started publishing reviews.

4. After the research, naturally they want to stay ahead of the trend and buy something new. Toothpaste, for instance: the mid- to high-end share of the market keeps climbing steadily. At the end of 2015 Oral-B launched a toothpaste set retailing for 159 yuan. Its target customers were said to be “young people with money to spend who like trying new things.”

5. Not easily fooled. In a QDaily Research Lab survey, “Which things that claim to capture young people’s attention just make you laugh?”, we got 9,399 responses. Participants said products hyped as “your first XXX as a young person” strike them as low-end and cheap, and they won’t buy them.

No compromise on quality of life, plus a few “fussy” habits

The British writers Heim and Craig joked that “allergy” is a rather middle-class word, implying attention and sensitivity to one’s own body. The same goes for goods and ways of living. Young people, for instance, are all more or less color-obsessed, alert to slight differences in shade, and their mysterious devotion to color schemes shapes what they buy. In a QDaily Research Lab survey on the symptoms of color obsession, the top answers were “won’t even download an app if the icon’s colors are too ugly” (24.2%) and “devoted to one color — open the closet and it’s nearly all one palette” (20.2%).

1. Buying a book isn’t a matter of searching the title and being done with it; they compare how different translators handle it, and tell the original-language edition from the Hong Kong and Taiwan editions and the mainland one. They have publishers they prefer, too.

2. For running, they can have 10 different apps installed, covering steps, calories, heart rate and meal planning.

3. The kitchen goes Western, since Western cooking cares more about precision. They’ll buy everything from a jam-jar spatula to a bread machine and measuring spoons. DIY stands for a pursuit of quality: they can make safer food, and use better coffee beans more to their taste.

4. Even sleep has turned into a ritual-heavy event: memory foam or buckwheat hulls in the pillow, springs or latex in the mattress, music or white noise, lavender or grapefruit oil in the MUJI diffuser — every one of them a hard call.

5. They can absorb the occasional impulsive extravagance. In the QDaily Research Lab survey “What impulsive extravagance have you committed?”, “bought something I liked at full price instead of waiting for the sale” (257 votes) and “crossed most of the city for one bowl of noodles, and the cab fare cost more than the noodles” (154 votes) were both near the top.

6. There’s always something worth buying the expensive version of. In the survey “Which things feel more effective the less you can afford them?”, 25.8% agreed that “your skin is bad because you haven’t used La Mer yet,” and 18.1% that “how are you supposed to keep up a reading habit without a Kindle Oasis.”

A dislike of direct stimulation and blunt pleasure

The most common form of this is on the tongue. Paul Fussell said, “Only the poor crave sweetness.” The taste of food has been loaded with meaning about whether it is “refined.” Scarcity makes value: when sugar was scarce, refined sugar was a luxury and a mark of status; now, awash in salt, sugar and fat, sugar, fat and chili have all become marks of low taste.

1. What should this generation of the middle class’s palate be like? They love exotic spices of every kind and the bitterness of 99% cacao chocolate; they can pick out the structure tannins give a wine, and the “fresh” fruit acidity in unsweetened coffee.

2. And ideally less seasoning, so you taste “the ingredient itself.”

3. Every food-trend report says the future of food is “people caring more and more about eating healthily.” In big cities, healthy set meals, mixed fruit-and-vegetable juices and light salads are all popular with young people; what they share is low fat, low sugar and little salt.

4. Young people will try a food because of something they saw on the social platform Instagram. Recent Instagram hits include açaí bowls, avocado, kale and quinoa porridge — not only do they photograph well, they also mean the fan has to appreciate a niche palate.

Enjoying life, but also weighed down by pressure, and spending in particular ways to relieve it

“Anxiety” always turns up in writing about the middle class. Beyond the big subjects — healthcare, retirement, children’s education — the anxiety and pressure closest to daily life comes from work. Mills wrote that white-collar workers have “no serious aspirations about their work, and rarely manage to draw any positive satisfaction from the day-in, day-out grind.” No job is entirely to your liking and free of stress, so people want a hard line between work hours and the rest. The financial pressure of keeping up their present life is the reason they can’t quit; shopping and taking trips are what give them the nerve to go on without quitting.

“Soothing” and “escape” are also ways to draw young people into spending.

1. They don’t mind paying for products that soothe. In the QDaily Research Lab survey “What’s the most soothing thing you’ve ever bought?”, a comfortable bed drew the most votes (470), followed by a diffuser (170), and things like tablecloths and phone cases — “useless but good-looking things.”

2. They want to feel accompanied while they spend. In the QDaily Research Lab survey “Why do you love convenience stores?”, the top reason was “it’s always there when you want it” (31.3%): open 24 hours, on every corner, so there’s somewhere to eat even if you wake up starving at three in the morning.

3. Managing money is another way to ease the anxiety. Buying an apartment is a crushing burden in a first-tier city, but it’s still seen as a sound, necessary purchase — Chinese people tend to buy their first home younger than Americans do. Beyond that, buying wealth-management products online, and going to Hong Kong for insurance with “more diverse asset allocation and better value for the coverage,” have become trends too.

Being middle class often means falling short of those above you and doing fine next to those below. Young people with middle-class consumption habits don’t necessarily have much in the way of assets, but they don’t mind putting extra thought into improving their own lives; and because they want to stress that “doing fine next to those below,” they also often get accused of “putting on airs” and being “fussy.”

All in all, against a backdrop of “consumption upgrading,” when we use the term “middle class” today, it goes further and further beyond the old idea of sorting people by class or social stratum, and points instead to a way of spending, a set of consumption habits. Honestly, the reason the charge that the “middle class” is so pretentious strikes a chord is that this middle-class way of living is no longer all that niche — everyone can think of someone nearby, or even of their own life, and feel a bit of the same thing.

The QDaily Research Lab is a survey column from QDaily, an interactive platform for exploring all sorts of questions about how we live. It might look at a shift or trend in lifestyle, or at one brand’s service. Here you can vote, vent and take a position.

So far the QDaily Research Lab has published 40 surveys on the middle class, gathering 112,346 responses in all. You can search for them by keyword.