34 CultureShock! Chinaas politically uninvolved artists
or scientists, or as the most
corrupt of power-brokers in
China today.
Since economic reform began
in China in 1979, accelerating
through the 1980s and since,
Chinese have become more
free than ever to pursue and express individual desires and
dreams, at least to the extent their individual economic
means have expanded to match ‘New China’s’ economic
opportunities. As a result, the obvious, on-the-surface
complexity of mainland Chinese society today is far more
similar to that of the US or Europe than it is to China of
the Mao era.
Today there are religious Chinese and hedonistic bar-
hopping Chinese, fashion-conscious Chinese wearing the
latest from Gucci and Chinese who stick to Mao Suits due
to poverty or political convictions. There are Chinese sports
fans and opera fans, traditional sword dancers and hip-hop
break-dancers, techno-nerds and drag queens, drag-racing
fans and pseudo-intellectuals dragging on their Gauloises,
and everything in-between.
Increasingly, there are rich Chinese and poor Chinese,
which brings a host of social ills: crime and unrest that
marks the grinding poverty of a potentially permanent
underclass. Yet China today also has a middle class that the
World Bank estimates at 300 million people and growing,
placing China, famously, among the world’s top market, as
well as being the world’s top producer of consumer goods
of all kinds.There’s Chinese and Chinese
There are, in short, almost as many ways to describe the
Chinese people as there are individual Chinese. That said, to
help create some order out of the complexity, we offer the
following categories as one way to think about some of the
broad divisions within mainland Chinese society today:While China’s economic reform
has not yet led to wholesale
political transformation (and
may never lead to a Western-
style democracy), it has vastly
expanded the space in China
for popular and non-traditional
culture, and for the ‘marketplace
of ideas’.