From The Australian:
Many people looking from outside at China’s development, especially in this pivotal Olympic year, are searching for a floor of familiarity.
They want to be able to find the middle class in China’s contemporary social change, David Goodman says in his own chapter of The New Rich in China: Future Rulers, Present Lives, which he edited recently and is to be issued soon.
He says China’s transformation is seen as hopeful by those who see an equation between industrialisation and economic development on the one hand and the emergence of a peace-ensuring liberal democracy on the other.
“The argument that these people are ‘just like us’ is very seductive, especially if it is delivered without any hint of irony,” Goodman writes. [Full Text]
