TLDR: Middle class Chinese and China Watchers have a flawed understanding of modern China.

“But in your country, at least you get to choose your leader.” my coworker told me over drinks once. Jaded and privileged first world communist that I am, I just kind of shrugged. “Well, it doesn’t really mean anything.” I said. “You just choose from this guy or that guy and they’re both the same in the end.” But she, middle-class Chinese from a fairly well-off but not wealthy family, not of the spoiled rotten second-generation rich or in any other noticeable way, said: “But at least you get to choose.”

“You see,” someone else once told me, a young man in his twenties who worked at one of Guangzhou’s indeterminable finance firms, the hamster wheels in which tens of thousands of university-educated Chinese endlessly turn, “China is a completely capitalist country.” And then in a weary, amused tone: “But to get anything done, sometimes you have to put the socialist hat on for a little while.”

Another, a student at the South China University of Technology, one of Guangzhou’s more prestigious universities: “Well, I’m going to join the Party. But I don’t really care about any of that. It’s just for my career. That’s what everyone says.”

A fourth, a Guangzhou-based businesswoman who grew up in Taiwan: “Do you know how many people they killed? We came here a few years ago to find my grandfather, who had died in the Cultural Revolution. There was no grave. We had to go deep into the countryside to find him. And in the end we weren’t sure if we had. I hate them.”

And from another, making lots of money in Guangzhou’s flourishing real-estate business, more money than a foreigner like me, working in Zhujiang New Town, the city’s premier Central Business District, which a decade ago had been – people liked to tell you – only rice fields and old houses: “Other countries are just more civilized than China.”

Over the years I’ve met many people like this. Guangzhou is one of the most prosperous, wealthy and developed cities in China, and its middle class, made both of old-fashioned Cantonese locals and those from outside who smell the money, is proportionally prominent. On the surface it’s a city of shopping malls, fancy restaurants and office complexes, of kindergartens for busy parents and nightclubs and bars for exhausted office drones, a city made rich off of reform and opening up, where Deng Xiaoping is always ranked above Mao Zedong as the best modern Chinese leader. The provincial capital of Guangdong, cradle of the Xinhai Revolution, the powerhouse of the reform era and close relative to capitalist Hong Kong, Guangzhou is a city where usually before now it was always very easy to assume China had become ‘normal’. Beijing cabbies talk politics – Guangzhou cabbies look out at the hundreds of flags hung up each year for National Day and shake their heads and say “too many red flags” and keep driving. Until the last few years the propaganda was quiet and the presence of the Party a background event if you weren’t paying attention. And it was very easy to hear opinions that were officially heterodox like those above. Guangzhou’s traditional, rebellious culture helped. But another part of this – what I’m talking about today – was class.

The people outlined above did not grow up – and had not become – rich. But when I met them they were all rich enough to be living in the wealthier parts of Guangzhou, the gated communities of the city centres, and to be studying or have studied at good universities. They all had travelled; they all wore foreign brands and had decent enough smartphones. Many of them might have enjoyed a good drink sometimes but did not chug beer at streetside dapaidang every night but spent most of their free time going to the gym and playing games and taking selfies with friends. They ate at upmarket chain restaurants in the shopping malls, and did not go to dirty neon-lit KTV places but family-friendly chain ones. They worked in shirts and suit trousers or skirts, white-collar uniforms, with lanyards to show their identity as staff at this or that company during quick convenience store lunchbreaks before back to a gruelling work schedule sat at a computer all day. Some of them, on the other hand, owned small businesses, and were always keenly watching the outside world for the shifting winds of capitalism. If they had children they were also committed to learning English or playing the piano or learning to code of a weekend or a school night. The non-stop commitment to self-improvement, living your best life and never letting the cracks show was everywhere.

In WeChat Moments posts the contrast always seemed stark – pretty-faced or handsome people in clean western clothes with their skin slightly photoshopped – ‘PS’, in slang – and a determined-to-be-happy smile, next to family elders with the hard dark skin of the old peasantry stooped over by their side, their expressions happy or tired or whatever but without the outwardly-conscious energy of the social media generation. These people were inwardly a little ground down by urban life, by the relentless weight of ‘involution’, the societal pressure to outperform your peers for diminishing returns endemic in modern China, by the brave new world of capitalism. Nevertheless they had ambition, and somehow in their daily lives summoned up boundless energy to match it.

Although frustrated by the inefficiencies, quirks and occasional cruelties of life under the party-state, rarely were they super-political; but they knew, just as they themselves were going to make it, to get enough money to save themselves from the spectre of hunger and poverty their haunted parents had taught them about, that China was going to make it too, that one day things would become better. And better, to people whose whole lives had been defined by the status of western brands, western objects, and western people, meant more western. Which might – if you talked privately, candidly, over a beer or in someone’s home – have one day meant western-style politics too.

These people told people like me the story we wanted to hear, or the story many of us wanted to hear, since to me “China will become a liberal democracy” is a little like “China will cut off its own legs for no good reason”. The idea that the middle class would eventually create a Chinese democracy was one still with some life to it in China Watcher circles when I arrived in Guangzhou a decade ago – regardless of which of Prince Charles’ ‘appalling communist waxworks’ was in charge, it was assumed that the spiral of expectations would, with material poverty now so majorly reduced, lead to a demand for the supposed spiritual poverty of the party-state to go too. And uh, yeah. Look at how that went.

Turns out there was another China story – another China – going on at the same time. It was spelt out not in high-rises and shiny buildings and the white-skinned happy-family consumers of every advertisement and billboard but between these things – in the narrow alleyways of the migrant worker neighbourhoods where people from the barren countryside without urban household registration dwelt working for survival wages, in the local villages where residents were facing encroaching gentrification by all of the malls, hotels and offices rising up around them, in the altars to old gods, Guan Yu, Confucius, Buddha and Mao which survived in the unregistered temples and the homes of poor families, and even amongst that same middle class itself where the exhaustion and pointlessness of it all was mounting, leading to not an embrace of the western ways embodied in the Zhujiang New Town office towers but a rejection of them.

This story has been picked up on by now. How could it not be? Xi Jinping’s time in office has seen a renaissance for anti-western, anti-democratic, patriotic and leftist ideas in Chinese society, the return of the Party to prominence even in relatively apolitical Guangzhou, and a resurgence of interest in that aforementioned barren countryside in both high politics and pop culture (witness the phenomenal success of rural lifestyle vlogger/tea saleswoman Li Ziqi). All this has changed China so much that many of our least favourite experts are proclaiming a ‘regression’, a ‘step back in time’, or even ‘Cultural Revolution 2’ (lmao). In fact the two things this period shares with the Cultural Revolution are that firstly it is a response to the errors of a previous era (the Cultural Revolution was fuelled by grassroots dissatisfaction with the bloated, unfair and corrupt party-state of the 1950s) and secondly that in western eyes it perfectly suits us to remove entirely the ‘grassroots’ part of the event and focus only on the elite. This is Xi’s China, after all, and everything within it was made by he and his chums. The focus of western analysis as to why the liberal segment of the middle-class not only failed to win power but now is stifled, and why in general China is not turning out to be on the road to liberal democracy, is upon Xi and his crackdowns and his new rules and his changes to education, politics and law. And it would be naïve not to talk about those factors. A key difference between the Cultural Revolution and now – I mean there’s so many of them – is that today’s politics are still top-down, to be implemented by the cadres based on their local understanding of the central government’s orders, rather than participatory. But we shouldn’t reduce them only to this stuff.

Continued in comments