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

This paper explores why the younger generation of the current Chinese emergent middle class engages in conspicuous consumption. It advances an argument that such collective behavior is not only attributable to the quest for social recognition and status, whereby they want to display their new social status by flaunting their wealth visibly, but also to the ruling Communist party's logic of governing. Using the Foucauldian concept of 'governmentality', this paper posits that consumerism is tacitly utilized by the authoritarian Chinese regime as a form of calculated 'pastoral' control to guide, from a distance without directly confronting this growing social force, the behaviour of the middle class away from citizen activism. It is premised on a socialist governmentality that stipulates that it is in the interest of the Chinese Party-state 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 quasi-veiled preferences that citizenry should engage with materialist consumption rather than politics.