CONSTRUCTING CHINA'S MIDDLE CLASS

China’s urban middle class is often treated as a byproduct of economic growth: well-educated, high-earning and modern. In reality, it is a carefully engineered social category, shaped through policy, cultural narratives and institutional mechanisms that align personal ambition with state-defined ideals. From property ownership and family formation to online behavior and lifestyle choices, civic loyalty is embedded in everyday life, with material, moral and emotional dimensions inseparably linked. This raises a question: how does the state cultivate a compliant, aspirational middle class while managing the tensions between lived realities and official ideals? 

Suzhi and Everyday Compliance

At the heart of the middle-class ideal is the concept of suzhi (素质), or “human quality.” Suzhi encompasses cultivated capacities such as education, civility, cultural taste, and patriotism that signal moral and civic worth. Demonstrating high suzhi becomes a form of everyday compliance, where personal ambition is inseparable from adherence to socially sanctioned behaviors. Families invest heavily in children’s academic and extracurricular activities, not only to secure social mobility but also to perform civic responsibility. Conversely, rural migrants and other socially peripheral groups are often labeled “low-suzhi”, facing exclusion from high-quality housing, elite schools, and professional networks.

This moral hierarchy reproduces class distinctions, with migrants strategically adopting urban practices to enhance their perceived suzhi . In this sense, suzhi functions both as a tool of governance and as a framework for social negotiation. The moralisation of personal conduct under the discourse of suzhi echoes earlier state strategies that sought to engineer civic virtue through demographic regulation. Prominently, the state has historically reinforced the link between population, resources and human quality through the One-Child Policy, summarized in the slogan: “control population growth, raise population quality” (kongzhi renkou zengzhang, tigao renkou suzhi). By limiting family size, resources could be concentrated on children’s education, healthcare, and nutrition, producing citizens of higher capability and civic value. This principle prioritizing human quality within managed social structures prefigures the contemporary emphasis on suzhi, illustrating a continuity in how the state shapes personal behavior to serve broader social and political objectives.

Family Life and the Performance of Middle-Class Identity

In China, institutional frameworks and state policies play a central role in shaping middle-class identity and reinforcing social hierarchies. The hukou system, for instance, continues to regulate access to urban resources, while urbanization and housing policies link property ownership and consumption to civic and moral status. Initiatives such as trade-in programs and “people-centered new-type urbanization” are designed not only to boost household spending but also to embed civic compliance into everyday economic behavior, connecting material wealth with markers of moral worth.

These dynamics extend deeply into intimate social practices, particularly marriage and family formation. Urban hukou status confers preferential access to state benefits, making marriage into urban households a strategic avenue for economic advancement. For rural families, marrying daughters into cities represents a long-term investment in financial security and social legitimacy. Housing privatization amplifies these pressures as within middle-class communities practices such as maintaining one’s home, participating in local associations and engaging in cultural activities signal discipline, responsibility and moral rectitude. Stable housing and financial security have thus become prerequisites for marriage, demonstrating how material conditions shape family decisions.

The state’s urbanization policies reinforce these social expectations. Through the 14th Five-Year Plan and the 2022 New Urbanization Implementation Plan, China has achieved rapid urban growth, expanding major metropolitan clusters such as the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei Region, while also promoting smaller county towns. Complementary housing policies including public rental programs, commercial housing subsidies, low-rent options and supportive mortgage measures help middle-class families access urban housing, further linking property ownership to social status. However, Hukou reforms and initiatives to make education more affordable, such as the “double reduction” policy and the 2022 Vocational Education Law has not reinforced upward mobility yet due to patchy implementations. The recent 15th Five-Year Plan sought to redress the uneven outcomes of earlier growth by integrating equity into the core of modernization policy. It shifts focus from infrastructure expansion to improving social welfare delivery, redistributing public resources toward education, healthcare and rural revitalization. At the same time, it links human capital development to technological self-reliance and green transformation, positioning social policy as both a welfare instrument and a driver of productivity in line with the “people-centered modernization” framework. However, the distributive promises of this agenda risk bypassing those most in need of mobility and recognition as has often occurred in the past.

Women, migrants, and the elderly are underrepresented in policy and cultural narratives. This marginalization pushes migrants to seek recognition through alternative means, most notably through investments in children’s education and extracurricular activities which serve both as strategies for upward mobility and as markers of civic and moral commitment for hukou holders. By promoting a compelling yet partially inaccessible model of middle-class life, the state encourages citizens to internalize behaviors and values that sustain social hierarchies, linking private family practices with broader civic and moral expectations.

Social Credit and Institutionalized Civic Compliance

Beyond shaping aspiration, the state has developed formal mechanisms to monitor and enforce civic behavior, most prominently through the social credit system. This system evaluates citizens across multiple domains financial, legal and social assigning rewards for compliant behavior and sanctions for violations. Timely payments, volunteer work, and adherence to traffic laws improve scores, while late payments, minor infractions, or perceived dishonesty can result in restricted travel, limited employment opportunities, or public exposure. For urban middle-class citizens, whose wealth, professional status, and social recognition are closely intertwined with consumption and lifestyle, these consequences are immediate and material. Social credit transforms civic responsibility from abstract moral ideals into routine, actionable behaviors. Families manage children’s schooling, finances, and social conduct with an eye to collective credit standing. Employers and landlords increasingly incorporate credit considerations, creating peer and institutional pressures that reinforce normative conduct.

The system operates alongside emerging digital infrastructures, particularly in areas such as healthcare and education which increasingly serve as sites of behavioral governance. National health insurance systems now rely on interconnected digital registries that track claims, patient records and contributions in real time. Eligibility and timely reimbursement depend on accurate registration, verified participation, and adherence to program rules. In some localities in Suining County, Jiangsu, authorities have experimented with explicitly linking social behavior to access: residents with violations in traffic, family planning or other regulated domains could face reduced healthcare benefits.

Normalisation via Media narratives

Institutional enforcement is complemented by media and consumer culture, which disseminate ideals of middle-class life and civic conduct. The government’s recent campaign to purge social media of pessimism targeting viral posts, influencers and platforms alike reveals that the state treats despondency as a threat to the moral and motivational fabric of the urban middle class. In a society where young professionals juggle soaring housing costs, cutthroat exams and uncertain career prospects, these online expressions of frustration are a barometer of the gap between state-promoted ideals and lived realities. By censoring narratives that suggest “hard work is useless” or that criticize systemic inequalities, authorities are attempting to make optimism, resilience and ambition a civic expectation. Content creators who make jokes about social hierarchies or point out disparities are swiftly reprimanded because it exposes tensions that could erode the disciplined, aspirational mindset the state cultivates. 

Resistance movements like tang ping (躺平 / Lying Flat movement), in which young people opt out of the rat race, illustrate how real pressures collide with state-imposed ideals. Yet even in retreat, these behaviors are mediated by surveillance and narratives; emotional compliance is never optional. The rise of China’s urban middle class demonstrates how aspiration, moral discourse and institutional mechanisms converge to cultivate civic loyalty. Families, workplaces and neighborhoods become sites where loyalty is rehearsed, visible and evaluated. In this framework, middle-class identity is both an aspirational project and a mode of governance. By linking personal ambition to socially sanctioned behavior, the state transforms civic loyalty into an everyday practice, ensuring that urban life itself becomes a vehicle for the internalization and performance of state-defined moral and civic norms.