A quarter of a century ago, the middle class comprised a very small part of the Chinese populace. It has grown extremely rapidly, spurred by China's breakneck economic development, by the emergence of private enterprise, by a rapid expansion of university education and by the priority placed on expertise by both the government and business. The urban middle class has become so economically, socially and politically salient that a small army of researchers now specializes in describing and analysing its composition, lifestyles and attitudes.

This thick new edited book brings together a formidable range of this research. Based on a conference held in 2009 at the Brookings Institution in Washington DC, it contains 15 chapters by 20 authors. Various chapters probe the educational and occupational makeup of the middle class and how its members variously conceive of their own identity. Some chapters place the Chinese middle class in comparative perspective vis-à-vis other countries. Other chapters examine whether the members of the middle class hold shared values and political attitudes, how they relate to the Chinese state, and whether the rise of the middle class is favourable to China's democratization.

Since the 1960s a number of major social scientists have posited that, internationally, the emergence of a large middle class is a prerequisite for the development of a well-functioning democracy. Barrington Moore phrased the thesis most memorably in Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy (1966): “No bourgeois, no democracy” (p. 498). In East Asia, the recent histories of Taiwan and South Korea exemplify this relationship between the rise of middle classes and democratization.

Sprinkled through this new book are occasional snippets of information hinting at the possibility that portions of the Chinese middle class might have similar inclinations: in particular, material on the role played by some members of the middle class using the internet (pp. 125–26, 234–35) and, in an interesting chapter by Ethan Michelson and Sida Liu, evidence that non-government lawyers in China tend to have liberal values. But the overwhelming evidence presented in the book is that China poses a counter-example to the middle-class democratization thesis. Among the authors who address this issue, almost all are in agreement that the Chinese middle class largely is satisfied with the political, economic and social status quo.

In the Tiananmen demonstrations of 1989, many members of the middle class had joined in the mass protests. But in the years since, alongside the expansion of China's economy, there has been a deliberate government policy to favour them through their pay slips and perks. One example of this, noted in two separate chapters by Luigi Tomba and by Joyce Yanyun Man, was a giant government-endorsed construction programme initiated in the 1990s to privatize housing. As part of this, vast numbers of very pleasant new apartment blocks were constructed, which were immediately sold off to favoured state-sector employees at bargain prices. Thanks to these hefty subsidies from public coffers, fortunate members of the salaried middle class can afford to live in comparative luxury alongside wealthy businesspeople who earn many times more. They and other salaried professionals have gained a material life that they had never imagined possible. They do not want to upset the apple cart. If the government's plan was to co-opt the middle class (and much of the middle class earns public-sector salaries), the policy has worked.

One consequence is that most of the middle class today does not favour democracy – that is, multi-party elections for the nation's leaders. A survey of three major cities designed by Chen Jie shows that a mere 25 per cent of middle-class respondents disagree with the statement, “Competition among several parties in election of government leaders should not be allowed” (p. 345). Only 23.5 per cent disagree with the statement, “The harmony of the community will be disrupted if people form their own organizations outside the government” (p. 342). And 23 per cent disagree with the statement, “In general, demonstrations should not be allowed because they frequently become disorderly and disruptive” (p. 342). From these responses it is obvious that if there is another outbreak like Tiananmen, many of them would prefer to be on the other side of the barricades – on the government's side.

Since much of the middle class is employed by the state, these responses might be attributed to their numerical influence. The writings by Barrington Moore and others that have proposed a linkage between the rise of a middle class and democratization have assumed that independent businesspeople comprise a core element of the middle class. Yet a chapter by Bruce Dickson on China's businesspeople concludes that “they are more inclined to support the status quo than to risk the uncertainty that democratization would entail. Far from being agents of change, they have become an essential source of political support for the CCP” (p. 295).

In short, both the businesspeople and the educated salaried middle class have become a bulwark of the current regime. We should not expect regime change or democratization any time soon. The rise of China's middle class blocks the way.

Inevitably, a book with so many separately authored papers on the Chinese middle class contains some overlaps. About half of all the chapters include discussions of the various ways in which authors inside China define and categorize the middle class, and these chapters often cite the same Chinese authors and works. Also, a few chapters are relatively weak, as can be expected in such a large book. But overall, this is a well-researched collection, and most of the chapters are well worth reading.