Interests of growing class with sympathies for free market and Western aspirations will suffer to protect China’s political model and state-controlled economy
US President Donald Trump’s trade war has little chance of reversing China’s economic and political model. But it could stimulate China’s hardliners to reinforce state controls and social constraints.
As a result, China’s nascent middle class will bear the brunt.
If the trade war is a competition about which side can withstand more misery, China holds at least one crucial advantage. As its propaganda puts it, China can outlast the US in a trade war because its people “are willing to bear losses in their personal life and share hardship with the state”.
But China’s middle class, namely urban white-collar workers and private business owners, may not be as patriotic as the government hoped. They generally own property and other assets, so they value private property rights and the market economy; they are often fans of iPhone, Google and Hollywood, with aspirations for Western lifestyles; they are those people complaining about Beijing on the Weibo account of the US embassy with regard to China’s stock market fall and air pollution.
Their endorsement of the free market and individualism are closer to the core values of the US than the collectivism and nationalism dogma of China’s propaganda department, which calls on people to surrender individual interests and rights for the sake of a powerful state and an upcoming “national rejuvenation”.
In fact, many of China’s middle class even welcome the trade war as a necessary external pressure on Beijing to change its increasingly heavy-handed interventionist approach to the economy.
The prospects of this class – a group ranging from 100 million to 300 million people, according to different estimates and standards – are, however, not bright.
