Thirty years ago, Wang's parents lived in a people's commune, a commune-like organization in which everything was collectively owned by the member peasants. Workers in factories enjoyed cradle-to-grave welfare. Another group, the intellectuals, including professors in colleges and showfolks, were tied in different organizations.    

Situations changed as China embraced a policy of opening to the outside world and reform in 1978, when national leader Deng Xiaoping and his supporters decided to end the class struggle and turn to economic development.    

Zhang Wanli, deputy researcher with the Sociology Institute of the China Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), notes that before 1978 China had three classes - peasants, workers, and intellectuals. Private enterprise was strictly prohibited. A peasant who sold eggs in rural free market would be seen as "the  tail of capitalism" that had to be cut off.    

Restrictions were gradually lifted from 1978. People could run private enterprises and employ workers. Later, foreign capital came. Thanks to those changes, commercial, financial and services sectors grew rapidly. New jobs, white-collar managers in foreign  and domestic enterprises, owners of small and medium-sized  enterprises, came into existence. So did professionals, like lawyers and accountants.    

Without the restraints of the old system, they gained the  freedom of mobility that allowed them acquire economic interests, like entrepreneurship and knowledge, in the budding markets.

"They do brainwork, and they use their cultural capital and  professional skills to earn their living," says Zhang Wanli.

However, the new class has stirred up controversies. Many people believe "middle class" is a lifestyle. They think a middle class family should own at least one apartment and one car, have a golf club membership, and often travel overseas. In other words, it is a lifestyle of the rich.

"I have no car, and I live in an apartment built as work unit accommodation from the CASS," says Zhang. "But when I was interviewing a millionaire entrepreneur at one time, he said I definitely belong to the middle class." Zhang says social status and professions, rather than incomes, play more important roles in defining social classes.

In 2001, the CASS conducted a nationwide survey, which found the middle class in terms of profession, including people with new jobs and in non-public sectors, and those government officials and intellectuals in the middle levels, accounted for 20 percent of the total population.

In that survey, elite intellectuals, executives, officials of vice-ministerial level and above, billionaires of private-business owners were divided as the upper class, while industrial workers, business people, and farmers and jobless people the lower classes.

Although people in the middle classes keep increasing in the past seven years, Zhang says its proportion of the population remains approximately the same as more rural people come to the cities to seek work. Considering that rural population account for almost 64 percent, it is really a large number.

In 2006, the state-run Outlook Weekly reported the newly emerging strata, including non-public sectors and professional people, accounted for 11.5 percent of the population and contributed almost one third of the total taxes. They also held more than half of the total technical patent rights.

"If the middle class can be quantified by money, I belong to it," says Eric Wang, "but it makes no sense - I'm only a high-paid worker."