China's New Middle ClassXia Jiaping opened his living room window and gazed out across the

China's New Middle Class

Xia Jiaping opened his living room window and gazed out across the city he calls home. "None of this was here when I was young," he said of the glass and steel towers rising in the distance.

The new skyscrapers weren't there before, but then, neither was the new class of Chinese to which Xia belongs.

His membership in that class is loudly proclaimed by the middle-class furnishings that are scattered about his 14th-floor apartment: a leather sofa, a flat-screen television, a flat-screen computer, a violin for his daughter, a microwave oven, and thick carpets. If the country has a history that's five millennia long as it says it has, then the rise of the middle class has occurred in scarcely the blink of an eye. Its emergence is one of the most rapid social transformations in history.

New Change

The creation of this middle class has either come from or has released from large-scale economic, social and cultural change and, in the eyes of many Chinese, it signals the beginning of a permanent transformation of Chinese society.

"Nobody in 1990 could have looked forward 10 years and predicted where China is today," said Shao Yibo, who received his MBA at Harvard University. He returned to Shanghai three years ago to start Eachnet. com, a Chinese version of eBay, the online auctioneer. "There have been some unimaginable changes in China. And people just have to be here to believe it. This is clearly a city where things are happening. Shanghai is an exciting place to be."

Shao's company, which offers Chinese consumers everything from cars to houses, cosmetics to computers, cell phones to antique Hong Kong bonds, is just one of the thousands of new, privately owned concerns appearing in Shanghai. These companies cater to middle class cravings while creating middle-class jobs.

China was not like the United States, Europe and even post-war Japan. Its growing consumer class does not have its roots in any middle-class ancestry. The parents of this new class of people invariably were workers or farmers.

Xia is now a manager at one of the world's largest software companies. He was born in this city in 1965, where he joined four older sisters in his parents' two-room home in a dormitory for factory workers. But, when China's reforms, which began in the late 1970s, meant that universities began accepting freshmen after being closed for a decade, Xia made the move. He was a diligent student, and in 1984 was admitted to Shanghai's Jiaotong University, to study applied mathematics.

Taking the Plunge

When he was about to graduate, an assortment of state-owned companies and research institutes visited Jiaotong to recruit. "I was offered a position by the East China Computer Research Institute, a government institute," Xia said. "At the time there were some other choices but nothing seemed as good as this. Things were in transition at the time but we were not so clear as to what was happening. I'd say most students went to state-owned institutions. " Xia worked for the institute for five years, all the time living with his parents. While he was at the institute he studied programming and became familiar with major software systems. His monthly pay was about US $ 250. Then, in 1993, he got a call that would change his life. "A salesman at this company called me and asked me to join," he explained. "But the first time they asked me I said I wasn't ready."

"I said I hadn't thought about taking the plunge into the sea," said Xia, using the expression common at the time for leaving the safety net of state employment and taking a risk in the private sector. "Then they called me again and came to my home. I was not alone in thinking it was a risk to do something like this, all of society thought it was a risk. You have to remember t

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