Spending Without Speaking: China's Middle Class, Governmentality, and Conspicuous Consumption

Spending Without Speaking: China's Middle Class, Governmentality, and Conspicuous Consumption

 

Abstract:

"This paper primarily aims to explain why the Chinese emergent middle class engage conspicuous consumption despite the fact that both traditional Confucianism and contemporary Chinese communist ideology regard wasteful consumption with disdain. Two hypotheses are proposed. Conventional sociological study of consumption based on Western capitalist societies leads us to identify the factor of status-seeking whereby the newly rich want to show off their new social status by flaunting their wealth visibly. Another is illustrated by the Foucaultian concept of ‘governmentality’ whereby consumerism is utilized by the authoritarian Chinese regime as a form of calculated ‘pastoral’ control to stem the spread of middle-class activism from a distance without directly confronting this growing social force. It is premised on a claim that the Chinese party-state finds that it is in its interest to exercise control and power over the people from within the individuals. Consequently, the emergent middle class is confronted with the pressure to navigate their own consumption patterns to align with the government’s hidden preferences that the citizenry should be engaged with materialist consumption rather than politics. An important theoretical implication of this study is that we will re-assess the common-sense claims based on modernization theory that with the rise of the middle class, China is heading towards a more individualized and liberal-democratic society. Rather, there is likelihood that with the Chinese party-state undertaking social engineering to govern the growth of a materialistic yet politically apathetic middle class, new modes of selfhood and sociality are emerging in reform-era China.