The "White Woman aesthetic" trend and Chinese class struggle

Hello, and welcome back to Sinow Babble. Another year, another six months, unexplained absence. I don't want to go too much into the details of why I haven't been uploading recently. Nothing bad's happened, it's just I got very busy with work and lots of other things. It's all very boring, but needless to say that I am back for the meantime. I want to talk a little bit about what's going to happen with Sinow Babble. If you don't know who I am and if you're really care about that and you just want to get into the story, then feel free to skip ahead to the appropriate time stamp. But if you do want to know a little bit about what's going to go on with Sinow Babble in the future, here's what I'm thinking. So I'm going to be doing new episodes every two to three weeks. So that's about two episodes a month. You'll get what you get and you'll like it. In terms of topics to discuss, as always I'm happy to consult with you guys, but I think for the episodes, I don't want them to be too on the nose with like following news and things like that. I do want them to be topical stories, things that are kind of ongoing and interesting, but not necessarily what's happened in last week's news, because first of all it's kind of hard to keep up with that. And second of all, that stuff can get a bit dated quite quickly. I thought it would be interesting to do things that are of ongoing relevancy. On Substack, there is a Substack as well, if you didn't know about it, follow me on Substack as well. I think Substack, I will be sticking to more newsworthy items. These episodes will be on YouTube, on most podcast platforms, and also on the website as well. So you should be able to find me somewhere at least. In terms of exclusive paid content, I do have a bimeo coffee and I want to do a little bit more with it. So what I'm planning to do is have basically two tiers at the moment. So the first tier is going to be more lighthearted stuff. I want to use that space to talk about my actual opinions about China in a more subjective manner. Those of you who have been following Sinebaba for a long time know that I try to keep the episodes fairly neutral, kind of discuss both sides of the argument. You can't be truly objective or unbiased ever, but I try as hard as possible. But I'm sure there are some of you who are curious about what I actually think and feel about China. So I think I'm going to upload once every couple of weeks onto there. If I see an interesting new story and just, you know, maybe even answer some questions that you guys might have about China or about my opinions about China on there as well. And then the second tier is going to be a bit more up close and personal. So people who have subscribed to the second tier will get full manuscripts of every single episode. I will also be hosting a monthly livestream with you guys where you can sort of ask some questions via the chat. And I will answer them and you can also get sort of like a sneak peek into how I research and write episodes as well. So basically I'll be working on an episode and chatting to you guys at the same time. And I thought that would be quite fun because I don't really get to do that much personal interaction with you guys. And I would like to do a bit more of that. So yes, that is all to come. So with all that introduction out of the way, let's start the actual episode. In the past five to six months, I haven't been keeping up with China that much. Obviously I've followed the major news stories and the untimely deaths of certain characters. But I haven't been keeping up with all the you know, latest trends and pop culture and things like that. So I was scrolling through looking for something to talk about. And one thing really jumped out at me immediately and just grabbed my attention. So I thought we could talk about that today because it ended up in this big sort of spiral thinking about this. So there's this new trend that's been taking social media by storm, specifically on an app called Shell Hongshu, which is like the Chinese equivalent of Instagram. The trend is called the white woman aesthetic. Now I'm sure there's an image that comes to mind when somebody says the phrase white woman aesthetic. And chances are you'll be right on the money or at least close to what is described as white woman aesthetic by the SEMP. The lifestyle switch is characterized by Luru lemon, yoga pants, Stanley Thermos and white people's food, which is considered to be healthy. Women are being drawn to a large range of products from tank tops and yoga pants to backpacks and thermoses, indicating a shift towards a more relaxed and comfortable way of life. Now if you look for images of this on social media, they describe everything from how to get your nails done, from what are the best snacks to eat, to what accessories are appropriate to match with everything. Interestingly, when I looked on Chinese media sites, I couldn't find that much about the trend, which indicates that it's either not very newsworthy or it's something that the government and the media want to not promote at all. But the reports I did find were not positive. In fact, they were very, very derogatory. The only major news outlet that I saw discussing it was the SEMP, but they seem to have got most of their information from another source called Housio, which is kind of like a trend report, an analytics company. So the report breaks down the trend in a lot of detail from top to bottom. So I'm just going to read out kind of the major sections of the report. And afterwards I want to dissect what I think the impact of it is, and what it's basically trying to say, not just about the trend, but about young middle class people in China in general. If you check out Xiao Hongshu, you'll notice a new racist trend framed by a new slogan, "Question the white woman, understand the white woman, and become the white woman." White women, with their yoga pants, giant thermoscops, tan skin, and a smile that has never suffered, have become the invisible spiritual beacons for millions of Chinese girls. But unfortunately, the laxity of capitalism with American characteristics is not just skin deep, it's in the bones. The white female aesthetic is a consumerist landscape shaped by the lifestyle of white American women. To deconstruct this emerging aesthetic, you need only to aim at a few essential magic weapons. What the girls call the white girls three-piece suit is a full set of Lulu lemon clothing, a giant standing thermos, burkin socks, ug, thick-sold snow boots, a puffed gym bag, or a pair of AirPods Max worth around 4000 yuan. Intersecting with yoga pants is the healthy and low-calorie white diet. A new food category, yoga balls, has even emerged to imitate the white girl. The yoga ball is very unique, and combines the three elements of white rice, cold, convenient, and unpalatable. Just add roasted nut cereal, blueberries, raspberries, figs, and other low sugar, middle-class fruits to the yoga, and a piece of dark chocolate, and put the word "healthy" on the screen. Led by popular TikTokers, their videos not only have huge views on TikTok, but also in China. But if you watch more, you'll find that everyone maintains the same daily routine, just like the replicants in Black Mirror, who are implanted with the same programme. They live in a clean and bright villa in the suburbs, wake up on time at 6am every day, and take off their silk eye masks, pick up their stany thermos, put on Kardashian brand-skinned nightgowns, and open an expensive large double door refrigerator. An expensive coffee machine on the expensive marble kitchen counter to make a latte, a toaster to make a few pieces of toast with cheese, or they use yoga and milk to make an oatmeal bowl. Then they walk into their huge wardrobe, select today's fitness outfit from the colorful Lululemon selection, put on their gym bag, pick up the huge stany thermos, make a cup of healthy sugar-free sweet water, and go off to the gym. When all of this is done, it may not even be 10 o'clock. Not only are their vlogs the same, but all the details are the same. The tight-fitting flora pajamas must be skims, because they need to outline the tight lines and plump bottocks from daily fitness in front of the camera. The boyfriend or husband who is in love with them must appear on camera to show that I am rich and loved. It's best to have a child or raise a few dogs and cats to show that you have a hot body and a maternal brilliance at the same time. A short three-minute video can contain hundreds of storyboards and each storyboard has one word clearly written on it. Money. Nowadays on the Xiao Hongshu, you can see many Chinese female bloggers who reproduce the daily life of white female internet celebrities one to one. They have a similar composition, similar storyboards, similar bedrooms, similar wake-up routines, similar skincare products, and exactly the same pajamas and water bottles. Looking at their backs, you can't tell whether they're Chinese girls or some white women imitating internet celebrities on TikTok. The white girl aesthetic has become an epidemic, an algorithm's distribute all related consumers products as quickly as possible. Open the app and every product of the same style is waving in their hands saying, "Come and buy me. If you own me, you'll have the life of a white middle-class American girl." But unfortunately, a room in a shared house cannot imitate the spacious echo of an American suburban villa. A migrant worker with a monthly salary of 8000 yuan cannot get up at 6am every day to do skincare and fitness. Unfortunately, reality is not so simple. Just as there is no middle class in China at all. The white girl aesthetic, as well as the items part of this huge system, are all selling the same thing, the ideology of capital fetishism. It never endingly sells you a healthy and correct lifestyle, early to bed and early to rise, regular work and rest, fitness exercise and clean eating, all of which are based on an extremely solid economic foundation. Those who have the ability to copy the lifestyle of white middle-class women have to pay the economic cost of matching the other party. The secret to all relaxation is money. We long to be successful white people, to be the so-called middle class, who do not need to squeeze into the subway and long for that suburban villa that does not belong to us. This in itself is a beautiful vision, but it's only a vision, because East Asians can never be white. Just like the biggest setbacks in a white person's life, they may be moving, the dog dying, someone speaking too loudly, the snow melting at all stepping in mud. This kind of stupidity, sweetness and innocence says, "I have never suffered in my life, and cannot be replicated no matter how many pieces of lululemon we've put on." Just like most white females on internet celebrities, they don't normally go to work. They have generous advertising income or a solid family background. They only need to show their lives in front of the camera, get up at 6am, exercise for three hours and eat organic food. It's like Truman took the initiative to enter the Truman's world, and for the person on the other side of the screen, it offers an ethereal placebo. Now, there are many many things that we can pick out from this report. Everything from the opening refrain about the trend being racist, to the internalized racist comments about Asian people never being able to be white. I actually want to talk about the overall tone, first of all. It kind of reads to me like the authors of the article don't really know whether they're trying to critique or make fun of the trend or whether they're kind of jealous of the people who are managing to pull it off. I know obviously that they're being satirical and they're trying to point out how vapid and shallow the entire trend is, but they're not so much writing off as silly, as they are trying to kind of tear it down and they're taking it very seriously, especially when they call it things like bland, uninspired, just American consumerist fetishism, these sorts of words. And then when they say that there is no Chinese middle class, they're kind of trying to draw that stark distinction between Chinese people and Western people and basically saying you can't be white, you can't be like them, there is no reality in which that reality would be authentic for you. But I don't think that any of these things really are actually valid critiques of the trend itself. It's more like the white woman aesthetic is picking at a wound for these people or kind of bringing up something that they don't want to admit themselves, something that they try and avoid. And I think that that thing is what it means to desire to be middle class in China and the existentialism that comes along with that desire. We've seen lots of trends coming up in China in recent years, especially ones that surround young people giving up, so like the lying flat trend or evolution. So this is kind of like the opposite of that, right? So people are actually enjoying their life, working hard, spending their money, but the problem with that is that they're buying into an American ized sense of a middle class lifestyle and that in itself is antifetical to Chinese moral values. When the author says that East Asians can never be white or that Chinese people can't be middle class, there's a sense of bitterness to the statement. They're kind of framing as if there is this mass Western middle class person who has never suffered a toll in their lives and they all live these perfect lives that would never want to one match with how life is in China for anyone. I think when Westerners see these trends online, the more mature brain knows that this is just what exactly what it is, it's just influencing, right? The only people who can actually wake up every morning, I spend three hours doing their hair and makeup and working out and drinking matcha lattes and things like that are influences. They don't represent an actual portion of society. There's no one else in society who's doing that because everyone else has work or they have children, they have other responsibilities. The idea around influencing is that you pick up one or two things. You might start drinking matcha lattes, you might start wearing Lulu Lemon, but I feel like in the West we understand that you don't take on this whole persona as reality. The influence doesn't go as far to influence entire generations of people, I think. You know, I'm speaking in quite broad terms here. I know a lot of young people these days have the aspiration to be an influencer, but it's not as if they think that they could live that type of lifestyle without being an influencer. That's an influencer lifestyle that if you do another job as a middle class person, you're not going to have the same schedule. Whereas this article seems to be taking it more seriously like this is how middle class people abroad in the West live. This isn't how you can live and you can never ever eat yoga as a Chinese person or something. This identity crisis around being middle class in China is something that's actually existed since the formation of the middle class in China. So around 30 or 40 years now. The question of how to define the middle class, how they should behave both socially and economically, is been a question ever since sociology just started discussing it. There's a book called The Making of the Chinese Middle Class by Jean-Louis Rocker, and this book is a very good discussion of this exact problem. So it was written in 2016 originally, so it's almost a decade old now, but it still captures that quintessential problem around how to define the Chinese middle class and where to place them both in Chinese society and as middle class people globally. So Rocker says, "Objective criteria such as education, income, occupation and level of consumption are all difficult to measure in China. While subjective criteria, such as lifestyle, manners, political ideas, and identification with a social figure, leave plenty of room for interpretation." The absence of distinction between plural and singular in the Chinese language further confuses the issue. In articles written in the Chinese language, there's no way to express whether the middle class is a collection of different strata, the middle class is, or a coherent singular class. Estimates of the size of the middle class range from a few percent to nearly 60% of the Chinese population. Mainstream scholars favor accounting criteria that are easily presented in nice graphs and scientific discourse. For the government, income is the most important element because its objective is to stimulate domestic demand. A blogger would emphasise the role of good manners and the emergence of a new generation of middle class educated citizen. The average Beijinger considers that it is the capacity to behave harmoniously that best characterises the middle class. So the very first problem is what criteria do you use to actually define the middle class in the first place? I think in the West we have quite a good sense of what makes up the middle class. If you talk to the average person, they might not be able to define it with words, but it's something that you know when you see it. In China, it seems to be a bit more complex because they haven't quite figured out what that perfect combination of material and intangible qualities is. First, the members of the Chinese middle class have a different origin from European, for example, French counterparts. In France, they come from the bourgeoisie or the lower class. In China, they came from the ranks of a class, employees and workers of urban public enterprises, that was the social basis of the regime. Second, by contrast with Europe, the new Chinese middle class did not replace the old one, rather the two groups arose simultaneously. Finally, in China, the discourse on middle class emanates from scholars with ties to officials in the party and the government. There were no opportunities to set up organizations, parties, associations and trade unions to represent the group or part of the group. In the West, the middle class has had over 100 years to develop by now. Interestingly, in China, if you remember the episodes in history that we did before, in China there was a middle class emerging in the 1920s and 30s under the warming down rule, but obviously that development was brought to a complete halt when the CCP won the Civil War and the capitalist model was replaced by the Marxist one. This is where the western and Chinese versions of class system began to diverge very strongly, and the reemergence of a middle class in China wasn't able to take place until the economic reforms of the 80s and 90s. According to Rocker, again, Labour productivity, income inequality, competition and so on became the rules of the game, making money, consuming, fighting to climb the social ladder, taking care of oneself as a valorising commodity, were understood to be positive attributes. Simultaneously, a new group of people, middle-incomers, emerged in urban areas. They were wage earners, urban, skilled, playing a crucial role in the functioning of the new economic sectors. They were running the economy without being in a dominant position. But money alone isn't enough to make you middle class, just because you have a median income, it doesn't mean that you belong to a specific social group, no matter what country you live in. There's always unspoken ways you have to act, things that you have to own, and certain qualities that you have to possess. Just as in western countries a few decades ago, new methodologies have been created and adopted. They read middle class media by middle class commodities, a house and a car, spend their leisure time in sporting and cultural activities associated with particular practices of the middle class and so on. More importantly, they are at the core of the civilising process, which has overwhelmed Chinese society. Being modern means to change the way people speak, eat, walk and behave in the public sphere, in order to catch up with the civilised countries. The middle class is associated with culture, Wenhua, civilisation, Wenming and quality soldier. I really want to pull out this mention of civilisation or Wenming here, as it's something that you hear a lot mentioned by Chinese politicians, especially in the Hu Jintao and Xi Jinping areas. We don't have a strong politicised sense in the west of the middle class people being kind of the moral standard of society, even if that is technically true. We've all heard of the middle class squeeze, meaning that middle class people tend to be more lower abiding, they pay more taxes, basically they are the model person in society, necessarily, whereas, you know, lower class people and maybe don't behave as desirably as they should, and upper class people also do not behave as well as they should. I don't know if anyone's ever seen the crown, this is a little bit of a tangent, but if you've ever seen the crown, there's a part where Margaret Thatcher goes to visit the royal family in Baomoral. Margaret Thatcher is very, very middle class and I think her father was working class, but she sort of rose up into the middle class ranks, and she wrote or was telling her husband that she was expecting the royal family to be extremely well mannered. The absolute epitome of etiquette and everything desirable that you would want to see in the way people behaved. But actually, she was extremely disappointed to see them behaving very uncutely, very roughly, and she equated their behavior closer to that of like the working class and the lower classes and stated that, you know, they behaved even worse than middle class people. So we do have this sense that middle class people are supposed to be sort of like the bearers of the moral standard of a nation, even if it's not something that we express out loud. But in China, this is explicit. The Chinese middle class isn't just some spontaneous growth of this educated, well earning slightly richer group of people. They're actually a social force that is used by the CCP as representatives on the global stage. Because now Chinese people can study and travel and work abroad or with foreign companies in China, they are seen as sort of the representatives of the whole nation. China's own rise as a modern nation is directly coupled with the rise of the Chinese middle class. And in this sense, it means that the Chinese middle class can't really be authentic or normalized in that sense. Going back to what the author of the white woman aesthetic article said about them not being any middle class in China, it's true that it's not normal to be middle class in China. Most I would say from having lived there or that albeit a while ago, that most people aren't what we would consider to be middle class in the West. But that's also because the norms and the values of Chinese middle class are not exactly the same as what they are over here. In China, leaders want in middle class that's well-mannered and prosperous, just like the Western middle class, but they don't want them to emulate them exactly in terms of their social values, their morals, and their spending habits, what they consume. The article that we discuss seems to imply that the class behavior that these young people, these young women who are buying into the white women trend are exhibiting is somehow immoral. And they're not being the good social force or the good example for the rest of society that they should be as middle class people with spare income. They don't want them to be Western so bad that the SEMP actually try to make it seem as if these girls wanting to be comfortable and live a more relaxed lifestyle is a bad thing. But if you think about it in terms of the Chinese propaganda that we've discussed before, that was very prominent in Maoist China in the 20th century, there's lots of reference to model citizens and model workers. These people were always the middle class of whatever society looked like at the time. They were factory workers, people in Dam Wei who had permanent housing, their children went to good schools, they lived a good urban life. Their life wasn't comfortable and they had to work very hard, but that made them good Chinese citizens for that period of time. And it was almost as if having to behave in a morally upstanding way at all times was their payment for being in this privileged position relatively speaking in society. You're not a poor peasant, you're an urban worker, you've got all these privileges, therefore you should be the model of the nation. Obviously over time this idealized version of what a middle class Chinese person should look like has changed, but it hasn't really disappeared. When I lived in China, all of my friends were middle class and their lives were not as comfortable as mine and there were certainly things that I took for granted like being able to move freely in the country, live in whatever city I wanted to travel around the world, even things like not having to share a dorm room with other people. That was sort of a comparison between a Western East, but if you compare them to people in their own society, they were very very privileged. They had many privileges, they had many things that the average working class person could not have like the latest phone, buying new clothes in general, traveling when it was the holiday season or whenever they wanted. Going on holiday, studying abroad, there's still that sense that you can immediately distinguish between members of different classes, just like we have in the UK or in other Western countries. You know when somebody is not quite of your class and the same thing can be said of Chinese people, Chinese students especially. I think going back to Rocker's book gives a very very good example of this. The problem is that the gap between the Chinese middle class and the lower classes is so big that even those who have the opportunity to cross it cannot but fail. The elite secondary school attached to Renda University in Beijing signed an agreement with the school from Lan Zhou, a city in the Chinese far west. Great noodles by the way. The objective was to allow some good pupils from Lan Zhou to attend the elite institution during the school year. These brilliant pupils were very disappointed. They were selected using traditional norms, capacity to memorize and accumulate knowledge, tested in the Gao Kao exam. But in Renda, they discovered that the elite had different aims. As urban dwellers, many of them were sure to attend prestigious universities and their challenge was to develop extra school talents to distinguish themselves in order to further their long-term career perspectives or to enter directly into foreign universities. The Lan Zhou students came back with the feeling that they were definitively country people not civilized enough. It's interesting that the Lan Zhou students actually come from a city but because the city is in the western part of China which is a lot poorer and it's probably not a tier one city which Beijing obviously is. Beijing is also very connected to the international community as well. So even though technically they're on the same level or being urban dwellers, they're not actually on the same level in reality. And that's something that they can sense immediately upon entering this elite school. We've actually discussed this in a previous episode on education in China where we discussed how the Gao Kao selects for smart people but doesn't select for personality or family background and things like that. And therefore you get poor students who are very intelligent going to universities with friends who have corporate work experience, who have family and high positions, who don't have to work on the weekends and can just relax because they get money from their parents. Even in China defining the middle class might be hard but it's something that the people who live there and people who are Chinese know when they see it. The reason why the Hushou article and the S&P kind of really focusing on this silly little Instagram trend quite a lot is because the middle class in China is kind of confined to social and cultural conversations. Unlike in Western societies there is no political association for the middle class. The middle class cannot be political because nobody can be political in China not really. Even though there was obviously some potential for this after malism as rocker points out in the wake of the Tiananmen Square movement the rise of the social rapidly reduced the public sphere to a space where only domestic affairs were discussed. So Chinese life is basically limited to social cultural and domestic issues. The nature of CCP rule means that classes necessarily cannot express themselves in a political manner and therefore cannot form any political class identity. And so realistically it's you can't but expect something like consumerism to step into fill that void. Especially if you consider the fact that both economic and social relations collapsed completely with the fall of malism and society opened up to not only the Western world but also just different ideas, different ways of making a living. Your living was no longer guaranteed. You didn't have to stay in your village and only married people there. You could travel. You can meet anyone. You can start a family anywhere. And because of that different ways of distinguishing yourself from your peers also emerge. In the Maoist period social distinction had to be described. As Chinese society was supposed to be egalitarian, ostentation was banned. Employment was a right and all workers were in one form or another state employees. Today China is the largest consuming market in the world. Chinese people move house, travel abroad, change jobs to earn more, invest in real estate and buy more and more sophisticated durable goods. Chinese consumers are catching up with their counterparts in wealthier countries. As a result, consumption has been one behavior by which to distinguish between social groups. Middle incomeers have changed their ways of consuming over time. In the 1980s they aim to buy the six big things. Video players, televisions, washing machines, cameras, refrigerators and electric plans. While food remained a very important item of consumption. Starting in the 1990s, products became more diversified. People spent money to get air conditioning, computers, mobile phones, houses and cars and to provide children with extra schooling. More recently, traveling abroad, following personal development activities or buying reasonable luxury items has become popular activities among middle incomeers. People spend huge amounts of money in restaurants, night bars, nightclubs, soreners, brothels and sports and fitness clubs. So even though the author has a sense that the idea of being middle class is an ever shifting goalpost in a sense. This was written in the 2010s so it only makes sense that new things are introduced that middle class people in China have to constantly be chasing. What we can take away from this is that being middle class is not a static position. It evolves over time and it requires you to keep up with whatever the new standard is. This is particularly interesting to me as a British person because it's difficult to explain but our class sensibility is a little bit more fixed in the UK and that's because it's not really tied to our economic development. British people will always see themselves as a worthy nation even if we drop to like a hundredth in the list of like GDP in the world. Our sense of working class is more like a mindset and it hasn't really changed over the past 100 years. They go to certain places, they have some hobbies, they speak certain ways. It's the same thing with middle class people, you know, you're expected to go to university, kind of get a white collar job, avoid certain places, live in a certain way, marry a certain kind of person, and then obviously within that you have some social mobility so you can be lower middle class or middle class or upper middle class and you always know where you were like growing up, I knew that it was middle middle class because both of my parents were civil servants and we lived in a three bedroom semi detached house in zone four in London like it was very set in my mind where I was and when I met someone and I heard about their background what school they went to, what jobs their parents did, what they wanted to be, where they went on holiday, how often they went on holiday. I knew exactly where they stood in the social stratification, it wasn't difficult for me to establish that because the rise of the Chinese middle class is much more closely tied to the economic development of China. The class stratification is for one of a better word wobbly, it feels more like people can move in and out of any particular class at any given moment because you don't own the right things, you don't live in the same place, something else has become trendy and you're behind the times. The ability to keep up with the trends and keep up with the symbols that represent your class are what defines your position within that class group. As Roca says, dreams are also socially patterned. For people who have never owned anything, they're coming a homeowner is an exciting experience. Obviously the first generation of middle class people, raised in the socialist era, transmitted to their children the love of property. In urban areas, newlyweds cannot imagine not owning a flat. Logically, the house is the symbol and the embodiment of this aspiration to comfort. Again, comparing that to Great Britain, you can be a middle class person through and through and be broke as hell, living in a shared flat with five other people and not have to pretend or think that you've somehow dropped out of your class stratification. So very, very different ways of conceptualising class between China and particularly the UK, perhaps Europe. Not so sure about the rest of the West. I'd be interested actually to hear your take. If you're from a Western country, that's not in Europe. What do you think defines middle class where you are? I think I'd be really interesting to learn if it adheres more to the Chinese sense of middle classness or to the sort of European sense. Like in every other developing or developed country, housing is becoming more expensive in China and so especially younger middle class people are starting to latch on to other consumerist trends that would show that their middle class but aren't as expensive as buying a whole house. So it makes sense that there are these constantly emerging trends like the white woman aesthetic, that young Chinese people quickly pick up on and try to emulate in order to show that they have that middle class aesthetic. But the problem lies within the fact that the creation of the middle class in China is not spontaneous and it's not actually linked solely to their habits or desires. There is this intrinsic link to the state and rocker describes it as the formation of a political discourse aimed at middleized China and at printing the existence of an ideal social class onto the imaginary of Chinese people. The continuation of the development of Chinese society would require the rise of a specific type of people who act, voice, behave and protest according to a specific social position. Jiang Zemin and the new generation of leaders who succeeded him had to deal with the social problems that were threatening social and political stability. The development of the middle class appeared to many officials as an ideal solution to China's social and political problems. But there's this pull, right? Between this class of people who are being used by the political elite for their own devices and a group of people who are trying as hard as possible to form their own identity. As I said, this was essentially caused by the collapse of the malism and the ability of people to spread out beyond their predefined groups. You know, you're no longer a worker, a peasant, a landlord, a capitalist. There's a much broader set of criteria from which you can pick and choose to form your own identity. Chinese people have discovered the necessity of being individuals. With collective entities disappearing, everyone is summoned to act as the subject of their own life. Everyone has to compete with everybody to display particular talents and tastes. Of course, the final judgment on people's qualities remains in the hands of society, but assessments are not made once and for all. They are the product of continual confrontations and adjustments of social imaginaries and individuals' performances. And it's that specific notion of individualism, of self-definition, of consumerism that are the ideas that the white woman aesthetic report is critiquing. It's young Chinese women in yoga pants eating SIE bowls, being fake and inauthentic that is the problem with the Chinese middle class in their view. And that's why they have to state things like there is no Chinese middle class. But in truth, it's way more complicated than that. Chinese middle class people do exist. There are many, many, many hundreds of millions of them, and I'm sure many of them would proudly identify as middle class. But then again, some of them might not because of all the negative connotations that come with that. The idea that they are just slightly westernised consumerist, boss, essentially, with none of their own taste, and worst of all, detached from what it truly means to be Chinese. I feel like the white woman aesthetic could have been a very lighthearted trend that was sort of brushed off or not even mentioned at all. But in said you've got relatively large outlets like the SEMP, and even some western outlets taking it very seriously. And it's kind of spoken about almost as if something that needs to be tackled, like the same problem that they have with the disillusioned youth or online flat. The article is taking it so seriously because these sorts of trends rub up directly against this ideal middle class that the CCP is trying to form through their own media and messaging. It's kind of this independence that seeped its way in through all of these kind of style means, even if Xiao Hongshu is a Chinese website and things like Instagram and YouTube or Band, somehow these western influenced trends are still making their way into China and polluting the minds of young people. We've seen similar issues pop up in recent years in China. You've seen the CCP cracking down on the ostentatious display of wealth online because they're trying to promote this idea of common prosperity, right? And so some people being more way richer than other people doesn't really look that good. They've also cracked down on things like fandoms and celebrity rankings because they see that to be a pernicious foreign corruption. As you already know, the CCP has full control over the media and even the image and way that celebrities behave either online or in person. Again, celebrities in China are supposed to be like these model workers of old. They're supposed to be wholesome and promote good values, avoid vices and never ever get into scandals. The white woman aesthetic girls are like the antithesis this. They're like the pimple on this very smooth veneer that the government has pain stakingly created about middle class morality in China. Instead of just being wholesome Chinese girls who wear Chinese brands and eat at Chinese restaurants, they're directly mimicking a western lifestyle one to one as something that's aspirational. The CCP would have no problem with these girls waking up with 6am if they were doing so to volunteer or going to work out with the grannies in the park and dancing or taikyutuan instead of going to the gym with puff bags and air pods and things like that. I remember the article mentioned something about having a child or a dog is seen as a good thing. But even in China, that scene is a good thing. Having pets is very trendy and they're trying very hard to get people to have more children. That in itself is obviously not the issue here. The issue is not that these white women are loved and they have children and they're happy. The issue is with the way that it's being displayed. The fact that their lives are easy and unattainable. Maybe they're just trying to have a bit of fun, express themselves in their individuality. Maybe they're trying to become professional influencers and get more brand deals and create their own life. But in the eyes of the CCP, that's not what they're doing. Instead, they're complicating what is already a very complicated reality of what it means to be middle class in China. Do you think that the CCP is justified in pushing back against these sorts of trends? Should Chinese people actually be allowed to express themselves and that interests without fear of being censored? What do you think would be the right thing to do? What would you do if you were one of these Chinese girls? But that's it for this episode, guys. Thank you so much for either listening or watching, depending on where you are finding this. The links to my substack and to my Biamia coffee will be in the description of this episode. And like I mentioned, my Biamia coffee subscriptions, you can either sign up for five pounds or ten pounds converted to your currency of wherever you are. And that will get you exclusive access to videos of me talking about my real opinions about China and Chinese news, full transcripts of every single episode, and a monthly livestream where you get to peek behind the scenes of what I'm working on and ask me any questions that you want. But that's it for this week, guys. I hope you enjoyed it, and I will see you again in the next one. Bye.