225m reasons for China’s leaders to worry

BEFORE the late 1990s China barely had a middle class. In 2000, 5m households made between $11,500 and $43,000 a year in current dollars; today 225m do. By 2020 the ranks of the Chinese middle class may well outnumber Europeans. This stunning development has boosted growth around the world and transformed China. Paddyfields have given way to skyscrapers, bicycles to traffic jams. An inward-looking nation has grown more cosmopolitan: last year Chinese people took 120m trips abroad, a fourfold rise in a decade. A vast Chinese chattering class has sprung up on social media.However, something is missing. In other authoritarian countries that grew rich, the new middle classes demanded political change. In South Korea student-led protests in the 1980s helped end military rule. In Taiwan in the 1990s middle-class demands for democracy led an authoritarian government to allow free elections.