Understanding middle class consumers from the justification of taste: a case study of Beijing

This paper focuses on the consumer orientation of the middle class in contemporary China, using the data from 30 interviews with middle class people conducted in Beijing. The existing literature tends to depict the Chinese middle class one-dimensionally as in pursuit of either conspicuous display or frugality and neglect the moral justifications consumers deploy, whereas this paper argues that peoples’ justifications for their tastes are key to understanding contemporary Chinese consumers. My analysis draws attention to both aesthetic and moral justifications of taste present in subjective accounts. It highlights consumers’ self-referential orientations: the pursuit of pleasure, tempered by considerations regarding comfort, is a major form of aesthetic justification. Living within one’s means, i.e. keeping a balance between expenditure and income, is the main moral justification of taste of the middle class. Consumers’ orientations draw on a new set of elements, conceptualised in this research as ‘the orientation toward personal pleasure and comfort’. Although having been common and widespread in most highly developed capitalist economies, these elements did not exist in Maoist China. Nevertheless, this orientation, combined with motives and orientations already present in China, can be seen to have taken effect from the way people justify their patterns of consumption in the course of interviews.