Catching up with the West: The Emergence of China's Middle Class with Professor Terry Sicular

Tuesday, November 30, 2021 | 11:00am-12:15pm Pacific Time

Catching up with the West: The Emergence of China's Middle Class 

China’s recent development strategy calls for the pursuit of ‘common prosperity’ and envisions the expansion of a prosperous middle class with high consumption that will stimulate sustained economic growth. Using household survey data and defining ‘prosperous middle class’ as being neither poor nor rich by developed-country standards, we show the rapid emergence of China’s prosperous middle class from 2002 to 2018. Using the 2018 data, we identify its main characteristics and investigate whether it is, in fact, a high-consumption group.

About the Speaker

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Terry Sicular is Professor and C. Robinson Distinguished Service Fellow of Economics at Western University (Canada). She is a leading North American specialist on the Chinese economy and has written extensively on inequality, poverty, the labor market and the rural economy in China. She is co-editor of and contributor to the book “Changing Trends in China’s Inequality: Evidence, Analysis and Prospects” (Oxford, 2020). Her work has appeared in the Review of Income and Wealth, the Journal of Development Economics, the Economic Journal, China Economic Review, the China Quarterly and the China Journal. She is a recipient of the Zhang Peigang Prize for Development Economics (2010) and the Sun Yefang Prize for Economic Science (2011, 2017). 

Seminar Series Moderators:

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Scott Rozelle is the Helen F. Farnsworth Senior Fellow and Co-Director of Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research at Stanford University. For the past 30 years, he has worked on the economics of poverty reduction. Currently, his work on poverty has its full focus on human capital, including issues of rural health, nutrition and education. For the past 20 year, Rozelle has been the chair of the International Advisory Board of the Center for Chinese Agricultural Policy, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS). In recent years Rozelle spends most of his time co-directing the Rural Education Action Project (REAP). In recognition of his outstanding achievements, Rozelle has received numerous honors and awards, including the Friendship Award in 2008, the highest award given to a non-Chinese by the Premier; and the National Science and Technology Collaboration Award in 2009 for scientific achievement in collaborative research.

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Hongbin Li is the James Liang Senior Fellow and Co-Director of the Stanford Center on China's Economy and Institutions in Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research. Hongbin obtained his Ph.D. in economics from Stanford University in 2001 and joined the economics department of the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), where he became full professor in 2007. He was also one of the two founding directors of the Institute of Economics and Finance at the CUHK. He taught at Tsinghua University in Beijing 2007-2016 and was C.V. Starr Chair Professor of Economics in the School of Economics and Management. He also founded and served as the Executive Associate Director of the China Social and Economic Data Center at Tsinghua University. He founded the Chinese College Student Survey (CCSS) in 2009 and the China Employer-Employee Survey (CEES) in 2014.

Hongbin’s research has been focused on the transition and development of the Chinese economy, and the evidence-based research results have been both widely covered by media outlets and well read by policy makers around the world . He is currently the co-editor of the Journal of Comparative Economics.

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