Spirit tales private server 201912/31/2023 ![]() The rapid expansion of the middle class has gradually extended beyond Shanghai and other megacities like Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. The average value of household assets among Shanghai residents was 8.07 million yuan (US$1.2 million), with a significant number of families owning two or three properties. According to a 2019 report by the People’s Bank of China, almost all registered families in Shanghai owned residential property. In 2018, over 5 million households in Shanghai shared this lifestyle and could be considered middle-class families, constituting 91 percent of the total registered households of the city. These developments have contributed to the birth and growth of a new socioeconomic stratum, the members of which enjoy a middle-class lifestyle with private property, cars, accumulated financial assets, and the financial freedom to travel overseas and educate their children abroad. Many of the important changes that have taken place over recent decades - the establishment of a stock market, foreign investment, the rise of private firms, land leasing, property booms, and expansion of higher education - either began in Shanghai or have otherwise affected this born-again city in a deep and enduring way. ![]() Shanghai’s distinct entrepreneurial spirit and cultural identity (known as haipai culture) quickly gained prominence after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reform and opening up took root in the 1980s and 1990s. Shanghai was not only the cradle of China’s modernization, but was also the birthplace of the Chinese adaptation of communism. As China’s most Westernized city prior to the Communist revolution in 1949, Shanghai has long served as a “laboratory” for evaluating the impact of transnational forces and the interaction between culture and politics, state and society, and East and West. Historically, Shanghai is known for its fascinating contradictions. China today, as exemplified and led by Shanghai, is also a crucible of change driven by a growing middle class. The dynamism and diversity of middle-class Shanghai challenges the caricature of the People’s Republic of China as a burgeoning hegemon with a Communist apparatus set on disseminating its singular ideology and development model.
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