How Do We Explain Middle-Class Anxiety — and How We Misread the Middle Class? | Living With the Future ⑧

This section takes up middle-class anxiety, social mobility and the hardening of class lines. We begin with the anxiety itself, and with how the middle class gets misread.

"Sometimes the point is not to change the world, but to explain it."

At a moment like this one — when what we need is a way to explain the world and a way to live with the future — we should listen to wise, independent voices.

We put our questions to more than 20 specialists in economics, law, sociology and communication studies.

The questions are many and tangled, but all of them bear directly on the lives the younger generation will lead. Our interviewees hope the world handed to the young works well and grows more civilized — and that in a confusing world, the young stay independent and reasonable.

Where will you be ten years from now? What will you have achieved ten years from now?

The economist He Fan's question may go to the heart of what people now call "middle-class anxiety."

We began with anxiety in its most general form. Middle class or not, whether young people who have just started working or students still in school, everyone feels it. Much of it is made of visible, nameable problems: housing, education and health care — public services and social protections that leave people worn out and unsafe; the fear that income and savings will shrink; the fear that a child will "lose at the starting line."

Why has it come to this?

Yan Fei, who has long studied Hong Kong, finds that anxiety there is more concrete than on the mainland: median income fell from HK$19,000 in 1997 to HK$17,000 in 2017, a drop of 15%, while over the same period average home prices rose from about HK$1 million in 1996 to HK$5.4 million, a fivefold increase. Add the uncertainty about changes to Hong Kong's political system, and the anxiety is real: "no road ahead, no future in sight." Mainland anxiety grew out of a period of fast-rising wealth. The income swings and the surging property prices look much like Hong Kong's, but the rest is more a mood or a state of mind, and its uncertainties run in more directions.

Hong Tao and Zhang Bin both look back to the 1980s and even the 1990s — decades just as uncertain and just as fast-changing, yet anxiety was not the background color of the whole society.

So why do we worry now?

Three questions about China's backbone stratum are worth attention. The first is about people's own circumstances — the everyday anxieties known as the "three big mountains": housing, schooling for the children, medical care for the old. The second is whether this stratum can grow: the danger that its members slide down, and the chance that more people rise into it. The first of those is the root of their anxiety; the second is the question of hardening class lines that has been debated more and more since 2016. The third, in a wider sense, is whether they can become the main force of a modernizing transition — as Huntington argued, when economic growth produces a large middle class, that class pushes the whole society toward democratization.

And in the future, what sort of society will the middle class, and their children, live in?

"Backbone stratum of society" is the official phrase; our interviewees sometimes swap in the more familiar "middle stratum" or "middle class." Strictly speaking these are not interchangeable. As Ren Jiantao puts it, the middle class is not a matter of wealth but of rights. On that point China's "middle class" is nowhere near ready to carry any larger mission — it can hardly bear the meaning Huntington gave the term. Huntington's hypothesis insisted that "if you want to create democracy, promote economic growth." We and our interviewees did discuss that possibility, in varying degrees.

Either way, anxiety — the anxiety of this backbone stratum above all — can be treated as a force that makes us think harder. And by thinking about it, we can hope it eventually becomes a force that moves society forward.

One of our interviewees, for instance, spoke about defusing the anxiety in the air through more political participation: "I think that when a country reaches a certain stage, this anxiety carries a certain inevitability. I don't think it's all abnormal. But the state has to give people a channel to let it out. Press freedom and parliamentary politics do, to a considerable degree, let people put their anxiety, their anger and their dissatisfaction into words."

The economist Wei Sen pointed to the elephant in the room behind so much of this anxiety: "Several thousand years of human history have proven that only a market economy can produce economic growth. We should develop the market economy without wavering, build a road of rule by law, and keep going down it. If we waver even on that — if I go back to a planned economy, if we talk about abolishing private ownership — then what are we doing today?"

At the core of the anxiety is that permanent question about the "gorges of history": what kind of future is China heading into?

This section takes up middle-class anxiety, social mobility and the hardening of class lines. We begin with the anxiety itself, and with how the middle class gets misread.

1) The middle class is not only a matter of wealth, but of rights

Ren Jiantao, professor of political science, Tsinghua University

A middle class presupposes, first of all, a system that recognizes the legitimacy of private property — that a citizen's property is inviolable. Only under such a system does a middle class that genuinely safeguards social stability appear.

In China, Party and state policy now puts particular stress on building a middle stratum for society. It does not say "middle class." Because an olive-shaped society is the most stable one, and the way the middle class lives disposes it to protect that stability.

But if we are borrowing Huntington's argument, some basic points need clearing up first. One: a middle class presupposes a system that recognizes the legitimacy of private property — that a citizen's property is inviolable. Only under such a system does a middle class that genuinely safeguards social stability appear. So "middle class" is not a term you can lift and use at will. Where the recognition of private property comes with too many conditions attached, there is no middle class in any strict sense — which is why I don't much credit the great deal of research Chinese sociology has produced under the middle-class banner.

Two: a middle class is not only a condition of assets but a socio-political condition. Where property is respected, the middle class first of all wants society to develop in good order, because it is then possible to rise from the middle into the propertied class. The room to move up is open. What it fears is that unstable policy and unpredictable development will drop it from the middle class into the propertyless. So it lives under a double pressure: pushing up toward assets, and decaying downward into nothing. That makes support for the middle class a very delicate socio-political policy for any properly ordered modern state. The whole project of building a welfare state is meant to solve exactly this: hold back great wealth, support the propertyless, build up or strengthen the middle.

But where is the real problem? It is whether the state has any grounds to support the middle class by expropriating assets. Or to expropriate assets in order to hand the propertyless state welfare. On this Huntington was not careful enough. What he was thinking about was the United States, where the middle class already performs a stabilizing socio-political function, and how to transplant that stability to newly democratizing societies. What he did not foresee is that in a newly democratic society one of the biggest problems is that the middle class's own property is unstable and not securely legitimate — because the legal protection of that property comes with many political conditions attached.

So for China today, if we want to borrow Huntington's theory, the first thing to settle is probably a further constitutional strengthening of individual property rights, and strong protection through the detailed civil-law provisions China is now drafting. The Gu Chujun case and the five major property disputes alongside it all show that in China even the rights of the propertied cannot be guaranteed — let alone the middle class's. So for China, protecting property may be the first institutional repair we have to make if we want to grow a middle class. That is the most important thing. Put simply: the legal protection of property still needs to be markedly strengthened.

2) The middle class is stable because it needs stability — and because the law protects it

Ren Jiantao, professor of political science, Tsinghua University

If there is no guarantee of safety in society, he keeps quiet out of fear and says nothing — and then the middle class has lost its socio-political function.

Second, on the socio-political function of the middle class, we have to admit there is no simple, direct line from "more middle-class people" to "a stable society." The middle class is, first, a group with an appetite for public life. To continue the earlier point: the middle class is the group that pays the most attention to public affairs. So the middle class is not just a property concept. Its property is protected by law, but its attention to public matters is the most important marker of what the middle class socially is. To protect that willingness to attend to public affairs: fearing a fall into the propertyless class and hoping to climb into the propertied one, the middle class cares most about the first subject of all — fairness and justice. When we say the middle class keeps society and the state stable, that is because of the weight it puts on things like the rule of law that the Fourth Plenary Session of the 18th Central Committee stressed. Can the rule of law transcend itself, and govern effectively? It is through the rule of law that the middle class comes to feel safe in society.

The first of these — legal protection — gives the middle class a sense of legal safety for its property. The second, participation, gives it a sense of social safety. That is why it will actively defend the established social arrangements. In an unjust society without rule of law, the middle class cannot perform that function. We must be clear about this. We cannot do what the sociologists do — transplant the concept and then start counting how many middle-class people we have and what social functions they perform. That is static research, or research into function. Studied dynamically, middle-class membership is always changing. Studied structurally, the question becomes: are its legal and socio-political positions secured? If they are, the middle of the olive-shaped society really can keep growing. Because if there is no guarantee of safety in society, he keeps quiet out of fear and says nothing — and then the middle class has lost its socio-political function. Once it has lost that function, power may press in, and the legal protection of property may be handled carelessly: there may be constitutional principles but no statutes to follow them; there may be statutes but no civil or criminal procedure to follow those.

And if the legal procedure does not follow, the second function cannot be performed either.

3) Calm and reasonable: the middle class is also a state of mind

Ren Jiantao, professor of political science, Tsinghua University

So many "volunteer fifty-centers" carry an intensely revolutionary streak. That actually damages the stability of our own government. But some senior people in the government do not grasp this elementary piece of political science; they take off their hats to the "volunteer fifty-centers" and crown them, and grant them political immunity. Whatever abuse they hurl is treated as justified, so long as they are being patriotic — nobody notices they are running patriotism as a business.

Third, and more important: the middle class is a habit of living. In a China as restless as today's, the middle-class habit is a relatively calm one. By restless I mean that everyone wants to get rich, which becomes the hardest material lever the middle class has. There is nothing wrong with that in itself. The problem is that when all people want is money, it is hard for them to acquire the middle-class mind. I'm restless; as long as I can take someone else's money, there's no bad thing I won't do — that is not a middle-class mentality. So the state attaches great importance to food and drug safety, and yet food and drug safety has not fundamentally improved. Why? Because people will stop at nothing to make money. They have no middle-class mind. The middle class is also a state of mind — calm, reasonable, in favor of peaceful reform. We do not want revolution. So many "volunteer fifty-centers" carry an intensely revolutionary streak. That actually damages the stability of our own government. But some senior people in the government do not grasp this elementary piece of political science; they take off their hats to the "volunteer fifty-centers" and crown them, and grant them political immunity. Whatever abuse they hurl is treated as justified, so long as they are being patriotic — nobody notices they are running patriotism as a business. This does enormous damage to the middle-class state of mind. To be unreasonable, restless, uninterested in reform, wanting to settle every social problem by violent revolution and arrive at the ideal in an instant — that is flatly impossible. So the middle class is a state of mind too, and this has to be stressed. In one sense Huntington's theory points the way, but it cannot be transplanted whole. China's social scientists, and my friends in sociology in particular, might pay closer attention to some of these fine distinctions.

4) What the middle class is, and what marks it out

He Fan, professor, Peking University HSBC Business School

Being a citizen doesn't mean I have the ability to take part in public decisions. I don't. Like swimming, like riding a bicycle — you have to practice.

The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, where I used to work, once produced a report on China's social strata that contained some interesting findings. One was about who the middle class actually is. Sort people by income alone and the middle class you identify does not match the people who think of themselves that way. Some earn a middling income but don't consider themselves middling — the lower ranks at foreign-invested firms, for example. Others don't earn all that much and consider themselves middle-income. But once you count in other social resources, welfare among them, the two roughly line up: what you hold economically and socially matches how you place yourself. Classic sociology, though, holds that the middle class is a conservative force — households with families and property, conservative in ideology, church on Sundays, a dull middle-class life. In China you find the opposite. Along the ideological spectrum, it is the lower strata who are morally and politically conservative, and the middle class that is ideologically radical. It doesn't fit the traditional theory.

China's biggest problem, I think, is that we have no experience of taking part in public affairs. Governance cannot be improved by government alone; it takes interaction between government and the public. That is good not only for civil society but for the government itself, because then it knows whom to talk to. A government facing an undifferentiated mass has a hard time communicating, because a mass is hard to control; with social organizations, you have a channel to the public and a lot of risk drops away. Which means people have to learn how to take part in public affairs. But right now we are afraid of every non-governmental organization, so the chance never comes, and people end up with very little capacity for public affairs and a high latent tendency toward violence — because they don't know how to talk to anyone. Look at the many residents' campaigns in urban housing compounds. In the first stage almost everyone joins in, and the language is all Cultural Revolution language: down with the profiteers, and so on. In the second stage it turns more reasonable; people who once worked in government, or lawyers, gradually become the leaders, because they know how to talk and how to negotiate. The process is in fact an education.

Every one of us is a primary-school pupil in political and social governance, and you need the chance to learn. Being a citizen doesn't mean I have the ability to take part in public decisions. I don't. Like swimming, like riding a bicycle — you have to practice. We don't have that ability now; how are we going to build more of it later?

5) Anchor expectations in the future and the anxiety may ease

He Fan, professor, Peking University HSBC Business School

Right now, from top to bottom, everyone is watching the short term — whether GDP growth this year is 6.5% or 6.7%. What does that mean?

Middle-class anxiety may not be about mobility, because the middle class has already moved up to this level, and the passage from the middle class upward is still fairly open. It is people at the bottom who have lost mobility. You used to be able to change your class position by joining the army, passing the college entrance exam or marrying. Now fewer and fewer people enlist; you don't go to university, because you can't afford it; and marriages that once crossed class lines are now matched between equals, so you cannot find a spouse outside your own stratum. All the passages have been sealed.

Middle-class anxiety, I think, comes mainly from the absence of any long-term expectation. There is a great deal about the future we cannot work out. Where does the anxiety lie? First, how much money will I need for old age? In a mature economy, once you have paid your pension contributions and your taxes, you can spend everything else, because you feel there is nothing to worry about. Here, why do you feel unsafe after earning so much? Because you have no idea how much you will need when you are old. There is no sound pension system. What you paid in will certainly not be enough, so you fall back on yourself — and how much does that take? It is a bottomless pit. Then there is no good public health care or health insurance either. If I fall ill, what will it cost? Again, no stable expectation. Children's education looks to me more like an arms race: everyone else is anxious, so you are anxious. Nothing to be done — a prisoner's dilemma.

But the main problem, I think, is still the absence of any long horizon. That has to do with how fast our policies change now. Long-term growth requires long-term investment; long-term investment requires that people form stable long-term expectations. In that sense, policy today has to give people an anchor in the future, something stable to expect. Perhaps it can't be done in a year or two, but people have to be told: this is the road we are going to take. Where will we be ten years from now? What will we have achieved ten years from now? Anchor the expectation ten years out. If I believe we really will get there in ten years, I can plan on a ten-year horizon. Right now, from top to bottom, everyone is watching the short term — whether GDP growth this year is 6.5% or 6.7%. What does that mean? Nothing. If expectations could be anchored in the future, people would probably feel less anxious.

6) Modernization is itself an anxious process

Wu Fei, professor, College of Media and International Culture, Zhejiang University

Wasn't it widespread anxiety that produced the Nazis in Germany? Hitler was a product of German anxiety.

Anxiety has several faces. First, modernization itself makes people anxious, because modernization prizes efficiency and speed and judges by results, and an approach of that kind will never pursue slowness. I think this is a universal effect of modernity's advance. Think of how we used to describe a civil servant at work: a cup of tea, a newspaper, half the day gone, no pressure, an unhurried life. His wealth was inadequate and his speed and efficiency low, but you notice he took relatively little from nature and the environment. It was a relatively balanced state, and there was rather less anxiety in it. Today is different: everyone else is advancing, everyone else is extracting wealth, everyone else is growing fast. That is one of the important changes modernity brought.

In Simmel's day the West went through its own wave of general anxiety. It is the same today — Western society is still very anxious. So that is the first great shift, a result of modernity itself. Modernity is guided by instrumental rationality and judges by effect, rather than by value rationality. This is the broad phenomenon we need to keep in view.

The other source of anxiety may be the uncertainty of our own lives. We don't know whether the environment we live in is safe. I don't know what tomorrow looks like. That kind of anxiety is the second layer. Our safety is challenged from many directions — terrorism, food safety, the environment, water, pollution; anything might be wrong. Without a sense of safety, you are bound to be anxious.

The first layer puts you in a competitive setting where you are afraid of falling behind. The second is that your safety is at stake. Against those two backdrops, psychological anxiety looks fairly normal. I think it is a problem that cannot be solved.

But anxiety has its good side too. It sends you looking for safety, for some possible shelter. Whether that means improving an institution or seeking a formal guarantee, you go looking for it. Human society will slowly find a better way to govern itself. Even the "community with a shared future for mankind" put forward by the Communist Party is, inside this general human anxiety, an attempt to find a sense of community — much as Christianity once stressed that all within the four seas are brothers, all of us children of God. That is one form consolation can take: universal values. So I think anxiety is unavoidable, but human beings are, after all, an unusually adaptable animal. That is an important part of why we are still the paragon of living things. Anxious as we are, we find within the anxiety a goal, a way through, a way to adjust. Perhaps one day we will find a different way to live; today we don't know what it is.

Many people have taken up tai chi or yoga now, trying to slow their lives down; more are turning vegetarian, or to God, or to Buddhism. They are always looking for something to lean on. So the third layer of anxiety I want to talk about is the relative absence of faith. As Marx said, everything traditional has been smashed and no new values have been built. In that situation the relative emptiness of the spirit produces a result — as our own government reports put it, many officials today have no faith and go chasing money and women. It is the same thing.

Modernity, safety, the absence of faith: all three can produce anxiety. Since we can see the problem, there will be different ways of responding and adjusting, so on this I am not especially pessimistic. There is another possibility, of course: that when anxiety builds past a certain point it turns destructive, becomes a force of destruction. Nature will certainly find a way to balance itself. It might be war, it might be plague, it might be widespread disease — one way or another it will find something to restore the balance.

So there is a natural law, some absolute force out of sight, balancing this kind of thing; you can't be sure. Which is why some people go out of their minds in the end and hack at strangers for no reason — it is all a way of venting. A social administrator has to watch for these destructive forms of venting. Wasn't it widespread anxiety that produced the Nazis in Germany? Hitler was a product of German anxiety. Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution was a form of anxiety too. He wanted to overtake Britain and America in the shortest possible time, which is where the Great Leap Forward came from, and after others criticized what he had done — Peng Dehuai above all — he launched the Cultural Revolution. That is also anxiety. So it is a rather complicated thing.

7) "Falling" is the permanent, and the largest, fear about the future

Wang Xiaoyu, associate professor of Chinese, Tongji University

"Wealth doesn't last three generations" tells you that personal property has always been extremely insecure.

What we face is not only hardening class lines but the prospect of sliding down them. Even if you are what people call middle class today, or elite, it is deeply uncertain what class your children — or you yourself — will occupy later. You can live in a 10-million-yuan luxury flat (before long a 10-million-yuan flat in a major city won't count as luxury), your children can attend a kindergarten with enormous fees, putting you in the top 0.1% or even the top 0.01% — and you can still be caught in a fire without timely rescue, or in a child-abuse case that gets a response only after the whole country is watching. To put it bluntly, even the most basic rights are not necessarily well protected. In such a situation anxiety spreads across classes, regions and age groups, and a climate of rancor sets in. Emigration becoming a hot topic says the same thing about how widespread the anxiety is.

Class lines sealed shut are a problem; classes need to be open, and at the same time stable enough to give people hope and a sense of safety — "those with constant property have constant hearts." There is a saying that wealth doesn't last three generations. Think it through and the phenomenon hides many problems and dangers. Excessive hereditary transmission deserves criticism, of course, but "wealth doesn't last three generations" tells you that personal property has always been extremely insecure. If your private rights were protected, and no catastrophe intervened, how could wealth fail to last three generations?

Wealth doesn't last three generations, yet "it takes three generations to make an aristocrat" — which means there are no aristocrats. Across national histories, the role of an aristocracy or an elite has been important. For a long stretch, "aristocrat" was a term of abuse, treated as identical with privilege, as if the aristocracy and the common people were two poles that could not coexist. But knocking the aristocrats down did not abolish privilege. On the contrary: with the privileged sitting vertically above the commoners, class lines hardened further.

Mencius said, "Only the shi can keep a constant heart without constant property." Judging by historical experience, keeping a constant heart without constant property was very hard even for the shi; the overwhelming majority could not do it.

Look around today and it seems that apart from the old people dancing in the square, who feel happy, every stratum feels anxious. One striking symptom is that "everyone has turned middle-aged, and middle age has turned greasy." For years the phrase "middle-aged" was rarely heard; what replaced it was an ever-lengthening "youth." A claim circulated widely that the WHO defines youth as ages 18 to 65, and middle age as 66 to 79. It spread so far that on Youth Day, May 4, 2016, the United Nations' official Weibo account issued a flat correction: "The UN defines 'youth' as those between the ages of 15 and 24."

Only in the past year or two has "middle-aged" come back. The most surprising part is that the post-90s generation has rushed to join in, joking about their own "midlife crisis" while clutching a thermos of goji-berry tea. Demotivational "sang" culture is everywhere — the opposite of the 1980s, when the whole country was in a kind of adolescence and hoped to "take ten years off." The gap between these two collective moods has many causes, and one of them may be what people expect of the future. When every class faces the possibility of sliding downward, the belief that tomorrow will be better shifts, and collective anxiety naturally takes its place. Classes ought to flow into one another; but when every class strongly expects to fall, we are looking at a psychological crisis considerably worse than a midlife one.

8) The anxiety comes mostly from a clash of values

Zhang Bin, research fellow, Institute of World Economics and Politics, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences

During the years of high-speed growth the mood of the whole society wasn't anxiety; it felt a little manic. The 1980s didn't feel anxious — back then the world seemed to hold unlimited possibilities.

Improving human capital has a great deal to do with the age structure of the population. Family planning, the two-child and three-child policies — all of it should be scrapped as soon as possible, and policy from now on should encourage births rather than restrict them. Once a family has another child the question is not only bearing it but raising it and educating it: kindergarten, then school. If urban public services improve and the downstream problems are properly handled, I believe more families will want a second child. In the present environment people can't afford one and don't dare have one; and if they do, they can't take proper responsibility for the child. So it is not simply a matter of relaxing the two-child rule. What about kindergartens? What about school? All of it has to be solved together, so that people stop having so many worries about raising a child.

Why the anxiety? Look at it this way. When you were very poor, were you anxious? During China's years of high-speed growth the mood of the whole society wasn't anxiety; it felt a little manic. The 1980s didn't feel anxious — back then the world seemed to hold unlimited possibilities, and so did the ways of getting things done. Manic. Now it feels more anxious. That anxiety, I think, comes mostly from the clash between the two sets of values I mentioned. The way society is developing agrees less and less with the values you hold.

Take WeChat, which everybody reads. On WeChat you see a great deal of emotion expressed. Most of what is posted conveys not information so much as feeling, and the feeling is a way of saying you don't accept an idea. Some people worry every waking moment that a crisis is coming, that China is bound to collapse, that the yuan is bound to fall, that property values hide an enormous bubble. It is deeply rooted. They have never had confidence in the economy, in what they see in China, in the future; they feel unsafe. Because the changes don't match the order they imagine things ought to have. They believe the order should look one way, and reality develops differently. That gap makes them deeply pessimistic about how it will end.

Is the way the rules are changing in reality necessarily wrong? Not necessarily, I think. The rules you imagine aren't necessarily the ones that fit best. You may have an ultimate goal, but on the way there things take many forms, and now and then they veer off. Everyone probably feels this sharply: what he thinks is good, what he wants, doesn't match what he sees, and so he starts fearing that outcome, fearing it will end badly.

Why so much anxiety? Because more and more people feel that the way society is changing doesn't match the ideas they hold. And that anxiety is very sensitive to the economic cycle. When the economy is bad, the anxiety gets worse. In 2015 and 2016 it was worse; 2017 was better. People are in fact quite emotional, and anxiety is itself an emotion. When profits are rising and employment is improving, the anxiety isn't as bad; when those numbers turn, it gets worse, and it is amplified.

The shift in outlook that comes with structural transformation brings plenty of anxiety on its own, I think. If that mood then meets an economic downturn, it is amplified.

Hong Tao, professor, School of International Relations and Public Affairs, Fudan University

Hope comes from a belief that effort can change yourself or the world around you; hopelessness comes from the feeling that the world around you can never be moved, and that you are powerless even over yourself, because "I" can only be something other people define. People in the past had more hope, because the world still held some room for freedom; people today feel hopeless, because the world is completely controlled.

I was born in the 1960s and have lived through half a century of change in China. Housing, education, medical care — all of it is far better now than it was. You may have heard what housing in Shanghai used to be like: three generations in a single room of ten-odd square meters. So why are people more anxious today? I think people in the past still had hope, and people today mostly have hopelessness. Hope makes all the difference. With hope, however bad the present is, you feel it will get better. Hopelessness means nothing can be changed — not the world, not yourself. "I" cannot decide anything about myself; I can only be decided.

How did that shift happen? It is a complicated question. It may have to do with the stages of economic development. From the beginning of reform and opening until the turn of the century, the whole of Chinese society was changing at high speed; after 2000 everything cooled, set and contracted. Economic power, political power and cultural power grew more concentrated, gathering into fewer hands. Ordinary people made this world, and yet the world they made stands against them, stronger every day and impossible to move. Today, apart from a very small elite of the powerful, most people live under the weight of the "three big mountains": housing, medical care, education. On my income, buying the flat I live in would take at least 25 years of not eating or drinking. How many years does a person work in a lifetime? Queuing three hours for a five-minute consultation over some minor complaint is perfectly normal. I have less direct experience of education, but I know the resources are unevenly distributed, and that in some places teachers are shouting for their wages. On the whole, ordinary Chinese people don't make a fuss much anymore — whether because they have grown more civilized, or because they feel a fuss is useless and changes nothing, I can't say.

The Chinese state is too strong and Chinese society too weak. The state can launch spacecraft and build aircraft carriers, but is not very willing to invest in medical care or education, where it owes a great deal. I read online recently that a well-known Tsinghua professor said our overall national strength has already surpassed America's. But America — and Japan and Europe, which we supposedly passed long ago — what is their social welfare like? Their medical care? Their education? Have we passed them?

China is formidable now, so everywhere you hear "amazing, my country." What ought to be said is "amazing, my people" — otherwise how does China show itself to be a socialist country? How does the Communist Party show itself to be Marxist? Say what you do and do what you say: surely that is not meant only for ordinary people. When the "people" want to be a little better off, a little stronger, teeth start grinding, and nothing short of ruining them will settle the sovereign's rage; only a weak and degraded people will do. That isn't socialism. That is Legalism.

9) The greatest anxiety is that the direction, and the reforms, are unclear

Wei Sen, professor of economics, Fudan University

If we waver even on that — if I go back to a planned economy, like Zhou Xincheng at Renmin University, and talk about abolishing private ownership — then what are we doing today?

The crux is that we don't know where the country is going. That is the big direction. Are you taking the socialist road or the capitalist one? Zhou Xincheng at Renmin University says that staying true to the original aspiration means abolishing private ownership. Well, if private ownership is abolished and we go back to a planned economy, what business am I supposed to run? What am I supposed to invest in? If one day we are striking down local despots and dividing up the land again, what is there to develop? This anxiety touches everyone. If we return to the planned economy, assets, property and firms all become public. Nothing makes people more anxious than that. The crux is China's direction: the reforms are unclear.

The Chinese talent for business is extremely strong — no less than Israel's, South Korea's or Japan's, no less than any nation's. Chinese entrepreneurship is almost like the pines on Mount Huang: give it a little water and it grows into a tree. Financing is hard and expensive, taxes are heavy, labor costs are rising, the yuan is appreciating; business is very difficult. And still these entrepreneurs struggle on with technical innovation, expanding their firms, moving forward. That is the healthy side of China's economy.

When I went to Germany, I found that we Chinese have both the commercial spirit of the Israelis or the East Asians and a real deftness at making things. Our phones are made very well; so are our small appliances, no worse than the Germans'. China has both. If things go wrong, the crux is still the direction. Look at the 1980s and 1990s: intellectuals were optimistic, everyone was full of enthusiasm, offering ideas, looking for a place to break through — where should reform begin? Who is like that now? Now it is: I won't stick my neck out, I won't push, keeping quiet is safest.

The key sentence: since several thousand years of human history have proven that only a market economy can produce economic growth, we should develop the market economy without wavering, build a road of rule by law, and keep going down it. If we waver even on that — if I go back to a planned economy, like Zhou Xincheng at Renmin University, and talk about abolishing private ownership — then what are we doing today?

Appendix: Huntington's middle-class hypothesis in The Third Wave

Economic development requires a high level of urbanization, literacy and education. It also changes the structure of employment, reducing the size and importance of the peasantry and enlarging the middle class and the urban working class. Those two groups go on demanding a voice and influence in the policies that affect them.

As their education rises, they become able to organize unions, political parties and civic groups to advance their interests.

Second, economic development produces more public and private resources to be distributed among the various groups. Politics becomes less and less a zero-sum game of life and death. Compromise and tolerance are therefore encouraged.

Third, economic growth creates a more complex economy, and such an economy becomes harder and harder for the state to control. As the planned economies showed, state control of the economy can be maintained only at the price of stagnation.

Fourth, the state's loosening grip on the economy allows independent centers of power to appear and grow. Those centers rest precisely on private control of capital, technology and communications. The propertied class that holds them demands a political system it can influence — one not entirely dominated by a military junta, a politburo, or a dictator and his circle.

Finally, although economic growth often widens income inequality in the short run, in the long run it produces a more equal distribution of income. Democracy is incompatible with complete economic equality, which is possible only under an oppressive dictatorship. But democratic politics is also incompatible with enormous inequality of wealth and income. Economic growth eventually narrows those inequalities, and so also helps democracy emerge.

(Further installments to come.)

The interviewees in this installment:

Graphics: Feng Xiuxia

Cover image: a still from the film Hindi Medium, from Douban.