In 2001, the CASS conducted a nationwide survey, which found the middle class in terms of profession, including people with new jobs and in non-public sectors, and those government officials and intellectuals in the middle levels, accounted for 20 percent of the total population.

In that survey, elite intellectuals, executives, officials of vice-ministerial level and above, billionaires of private-business owners were divided as the upper class, while industrial workers, business people, and farmers and jobless people the lower classes.

Although people in the middle classes keep increasing in the past seven years, Zhang says its proportion of the population remains approximately the same as more rural people come to the cities to seek work. Considering that rural population account almost 64 percent, it is really a large number.

In 2006, the state-run Outlook Weekly reported the newly emerging strata, including non-public sectors and professional people, accounted for 11.5 percent of the population and contributed almost one third of the total taxes. They also held more than half of the total technical patent rights.

"If the middle class can be quantified by money, I belong to it," says Eric Wang, "but it makes no sense - I'm only a high-paid worker."

China's middle class is trying to find a place in the established political system. However, recent years have witnessed the rise of the middle class's political status. Intellectuals discuss public policies in the media. Governments and legislatures consult lawyers and accountants on laws and regulations.

Zhang points out that more private entrepreneurs and professionals became delegates to the most recent National Congress of the Communist Party of China in 2007. Considering the increasing economic and social influence of the new social stratum, the Party has made efforts to include them in the political mechanisms.

The year of 2007 saw the implementation of the long-awaited property law, which defined the legal status of private assets, giving individuals the same rights over their property as the state and collectives.

At the end 2007, residents of the scenic coastal city of Xiamen, southeast China's Fujian Province, protested peacefully against a plan to build an 11-billion-yuan factory producing the industrial chemical paraxylene after a local chemical scientist Zhao Yufen, who is also an academician of Chinese Academy of Sciences identified potential risks later made a proposal to the political advisory body, calling for reconsideration.

After the proposal was published, residents and property owners near the project site worried about the environmental impact, expressing opposition to the project through the Internet, text messages and "walks" at the site. The government later suspended the project.

The incident is widely seen as the rising political influence of China's middle class. Popular newspaper Southern Weekly called it a milestone for the rise of a civil society.

As for the middle class, however, politics is still far from their lives. To Eric Wang, politics only means giving opinions to accounting regulators via his boss. When the government regulators want to issue or amend regulations on accounting, “my boss will be consulted,” he says.

But Wang himself wants more. "Someday when I earn more economic power, I think the middle class as whole may expect higher political status," he says.

(Xinhua News Agency October 5, 2008)