In the half century since the end of the Mao era, the Chinese Communist Party has relied on a growing and increasingly prosperous middle class for its legitimacy. While about 600 million Chinese still live on five dollars a day and perhaps another 200 million rural migrants in first- or second-tier cities live on 15 to 25 dollars a day, they have little hope for advancing their lot in life because of Hukou, the regime’s harsh internal-passport system. The rural Hukou are not the citizens with whom the party has made its bargain of growing prosperity in exchange for tacit support of the regime. Rather it is the more highly educated and upwardly mobile citizens in Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou and in the numerous second-tier cities on whom the CCP depends. And it’s this group, with an urban Hukou, roughly 600 million, who are having a profound change of heart. For these, hope for a better future has been quashed. They were brutalized during the Covid lockdowns, which led to widespread tension across the cities. The regime acknowledged that social crisis by lifting the lockdown almost overnight. Unlike much of the post-Covid world, China remains mired in economic distress. The urban middle class is awake to the reality. This is a source of significant challenge to the party.
Indeed, PRC legitimacy at least in the past two decades has been based on the regime’s tacit agreement with the urban middle class to provide for their growing personal prosperity in exchange for their forsaking democracy and all its trimmings (a free press, free speech, free religion, and the like). With Xi Jinping’s ascension to the position of general secretary of the CCP in 2012, the concept was institutionalized as the “Chinese Dream.” Xi called for a national rejuvenation and for China greatness. Articulating the vision in 2012, he called for the country to be “a moderately well-off society by 2021,” the 100th anniversary of the CCP, and to be a fully developed country by 2049, the centenary of the PRC.
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