BEIJING — BEIJING -- If you believe the advertisements portraying China's middle class, you might think that their spacious and modern homes and polished white teeth are representative of this rapidly changing nation.
But experts warn that Chinese and foreign media have constructed a far bigger myth: that China's middle class is an emerging force and that its demands for participation could push the Communist Party toward political reform.
"China's middle class is an academic bubble," scoffed He Qinglian, a Chinese economist living in the U.S. She dismisses the middle class' political demands as insignificant because "the middle class has developed through reliance on the rich and powerful classes."
The concept of class remains an ideological minefield in this nominally communist country. Just as sensitive is the perception held by many ordinary Chinese that the spoils of modernization have gone to a privileged few.
"The people who've prospered from the reforms are those with power and connections," said Zhang, an unemployed worker who asked that his full name not be used.
Had things gone differently, Zhang, 42, might have joined the middle class. He worked for a state-owned factory in Beijing from 1980 to 1990 but was laid off when his company farmed work out to rural factories.
Now Zhang peddles postcards and Mao Tse-tung's Little Red Book of quotations to tourists outside the Forbidden City by day. At night, he retires to the shack he built on the property of his parents' employers.
"It's just too hard. You're working one day and unemployed the next," he said. "Ordinary people have no feeling of security or stability."
Qinghua University sociologist Sun Liping sees in people like Zhang a failed middle class. In an essay on the Internet, he warns of a "fractured society" in which people in the same country live in different technological ages.
While "the advanced sectors of this backward nation are becoming more advanced, the distance between these sectors and the rest of society is growing larger," he says.
By most estimates, China's middle class represents a negligible bulge in the country's income distribution. A study by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, or CASS, this year estimated China's middle class at about 110 million -- just 15% of the working population -- compared with nearly 60% in the U.S.
