The year 2024 is a crucial year for implementing the strategic deployment of the 20th CPC National Congress and uniting in struggle to build a modern socialist country in all respects. To accomplish this strategic task, we must forge broad solidarity, uniting all positive forces that endorse Chinese modernization into an irresistible wave of advancement. Yet to achieve such unity and locate genuine forces for collective advance, we must adhere to the principle: "Unity attained through struggle will endure; unity sought through compromise will perish." To wage struggle uncompromisingly, we must openly acknowledge that different classes and class struggles objectively persist in contemporary Chinese society. Only then can we wield the golden key to understanding society: class analysis. We must distinguish genuine friends whom we must unite with from real enemies whom we must combat, ensuring our united struggle endures. Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This question is the primary question of the revolution. To rally our real friends to strike at our real enemies and ensure victory, we must distinguish true friends from foes by undertaking a general analysis of the economic status of the various classes in Chinese society and their respective attitudes toward the revolution. At the present stage, our principal contradiction is between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people's ever-growing needs for a better life. While the principal social contradiction has undergone a qualitative shift, China's economy has achieved breakthroughs, and the quantitative composition of each class has seen major transformations. It is therefore both urgent and necessary to conduct an analysis of the economic positions of each social class in contemporary China and their attitudes toward building a modern socialist country in all respects, thereby clearly discerning friend from foe. Who are our enemies? Who are our friends? This is the foremost question of the revolution, and likewise the primary question for comprehensively building a modern socialist country today. In short: whoever impedes balanced and adequate economic development and undermines the people’s pursuit of a better life is an enemy. Conversely, whoever promotes balanced, adequate growth and assists the people in realizing a better life is a friend.

I. The Current Distribution of Social Wealth in China

China International Capital Corporation (CICC, a subsidiary of Central Huijin and grandchild company of China Investment Corporation) released the China Wealth Report 2023. Given the publishing entity, its authority is substantial. The disclosed distribution of China's wealth came as a profound shock to many. Total national social wealth reached 790 trillion yuan, of which state assets accounted for 360 trillion yuan (45.5%). The wealthiest demographic accounts for a mere 0.3% of the total population, yet its aggregate assets reached 290 trillion yuan, commanding 67.44% of total private wealth. The middle class comprises 31 million households (99 million people), representing 7% of the total population, with aggregate assets of 110 trillion yuan (25.58%). The remaining population consists of approximately 1.3 billion people—representing 92% of the populace—yet its total assets amount to merely 30 trillion yuan, constituting only 6.98% of total private wealth. Compared with the United States, stark divergences emerge: the American middle class accounts for over 60% of the population holding 26% of wealth, while the super-rich oligarchic stratum accounts for only 1%. Below are charts compiled based on the CICC data to illustrate the private asset distribution in China: Figure 1 Figure 2

1. As shown in Figure 2, two typical pyramids emerge: one upright and one inverted.

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3. Clearly, this configuration far exceeds the commonly cited "80/20 rule". Combining the top two tiers, 7.33% of the population holds over 93% of the wealth.

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II. Monthly Household and Personal Income in Contemporary China

First, data from the China Institute for Income Distribution at Beijing Normal University reveals: in 2019, 964 million people in China had a monthly income below 2,000 yuan, 600 million people earned less than 1,090 yuan, 220 million earned less than 500 yuan, and 5.46 million recorded zero income. Online data from 2019 similarly shows that nearly 43% of the population lived in households with an average monthly per-capita income below 1,090 yuan, nearly 69% below 2,000 yuan, roughly 84% below 3,000 yuan, and approximately 95% below 5,000 yuan. Second, according to 2021 registered household data, China's rural population stood at 764 million. Dividing the rural population into five quintiles of 153 million each, their corresponding average monthly incomes in 2021 from lowest to highest were 404 yuan, 965 yuan, 1,378.8 yuan, 1,930 yuan, and 3,590 yuan. Third, in 2022, national per-capita disposable income was 36,883 yuan, of which per-capita wage income was 20,590 yuan (55.8%), averaging 1,716 yuan per month. Fourth, according to National Bureau of Statistics data for January–September 2023, per-capita disposable income stood at 29,398 yuan (39,428 yuan for urban residents and 15,705 yuan for rural residents). Converted to monthly per-capita disposable income: National average: 3,266.44 yuan; Urban residents: 4,380.89 yuan; Rural residents: 1,745 yuan. Thus, a demographic-economic distribution profile of China's 1.4 billion population emerges:

• Monthly household per-capita income under 1,000 yuan: 600 million people;

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• 1,000 to 3,000 yuan: 300 million people;

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• 3,000 to 5,000 yuan: 400 million people;

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• 5,000 yuan to high-net-worth affluent threshold: 50 million people;

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• High-net-worth affluent stratum: 50 million people. Synthesizing these figures leads to the inescapable conclusion: China currently has over 900 million low-income poor, 400 million middle class, and approximately 100 million wealthy elites. In other words:

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• 7.33% of the population owns 93.02% of the wealth.

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• 92.67% of the population owns merely 6.91% of the wealth. Several vital realities flow from these conclusions: First, in a socialist state, the fact that state-owned assets still constitute a substantial portion of total national wealth provides a material foundation for regulating distribution, aiding vulnerable strata, and coordinating social development. Second, the scale of private wealth concentrated in China’s billionaire stratum is staggering. If these assets are not converted into productive social investment and philanthropy or regulated via progressive taxation, but instead squandered on luxury, dissipation, and political lobbying to subjugate power, social decay and oligarchic manipulation will obstruct common prosperity. Third, that 1.3 billion people share a meager 7% of private wealth reveals severe class polarization. The path of "allowing some to get rich first so they can help the rest get rich" has either stalled or outright failed, demanding an entirely new path toward genuine common prosperity. These empirical findings are presented precisely to assess the economic baseline of each social class, enabling an accurate evaluation of their attitudes toward socialist modernization.

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III. The Class Realities of Contemporary Chinese Society

It must be emphasized that our analysis speaks of classes, not merely strata. In mainstream public discourse and academic circles today, "stratum analysis" has largely supplanted "class analysis". To oppose class struggle theory, certain intellectuals desperately substitute "stratum" for "class," using the former to erase the latter and confuse the public. This merely accommodates bourgeois economic orthodoxy, reflecting a compromised class stance. 1. The Emerging Landlord Class and the Big Bourgeoisie With China becoming the world's second-largest economy, qualitative shifts in wealth have spawned an emerging landlord class and a vast big bourgeoisie. The big bourgeoisie further subdivides into monopoly, comprador, financial, internet-platform, industrial, and bureaucratic bourgeoisies.

• A. Emerging Landlord Class: Refers to those in urban centers who, through historical demolition, land appropriation, and housing windfalls, possess massive property portfolios and live entirely off rental extraction.

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• B. Comprador Class: Widely present today, their bodies reside domestically while their hearts lean abroad, acting as conduits for international monopoly capital. Despised by both officials and commoners, their tactics have grown concealed, civilized, and refined, siphoning domestic wealth through transnational corporations. While introducing certain jobs, technical training, and supply chain infrastructure, they export the massive surplus value produced by Chinese workers abroad—constituting direct capitalist exploitation of our people.

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• C. Monopoly Bourgeoisie: Exploiting regulatory vacuums, they amass colossal capital across diverse industries, wielding wealth-power transactions and philanthropic masks to meddle in governance, forming collusive alliances with local officials. Their predatory expansion disrupts innovation, erodes public faith in the Party, resists genuine technological risk-taking, cowers before overseas competitors, and behaves rapaciously at home.

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• D. Financier Class: In a socialist nation, finance should empower the real economy; yet today's financial capital despises industry, indulges in wild leveraged speculation, cannibalizes manufacturing, and collaborates with foreign funds to short the domestic economy—as recent anti-corruption crackdowns have amply revealed.

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• E. Internet Platform Bourgeoisie: Utilizing monopolized algorithms and digital networks, they capture vast user bases. The deep value of network data does not stop at advertising traffic; it encompasses manipulating public opinion, monopolizing distribution, fabricating news, collecting behavioral data, and selling private information. Platform conglomerates—from ride-hailing to ed-tech giants—compete ruthlessly with ordinary working people for petty livelihoods. Because internet elements have become core forces of production, vigilance is required against platform monopolists acting as compradors and restricting the liberation of productive forces.

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• F. Industrial Bourgeoisie: Possesses a distinct dual nature. On one hand, they remain wary of foreign capital and despise compradors; on the other hand, they relentlessly exploit and suppress the proletariat. Their right wing dreams of foreign patronage, while their left wing maintains an upright patriotic stance, operates within legal bounds, and provides better welfare to workers. Though their role in international competition is critical, their bourgeois essence remains unchanged: their class status fundamentally relies on extracting surplus labor from proletarians.

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• G. Bureaucratic Bourgeoisie: Degenerated elements that have evolved from public servants since the establishment of socialist China. Detailed elaboration is omitted here to avoid censorship. In summary, all factions of the big bourgeoisie regard bourgeois right as their lifeblood and harbor political ambitions to bend state power to their interests. The key difference between the big bourgeoisie and the bureaucratic bourgeoisie is that the latter exercises public administrative power directly, while the former does so through intermediaries. The emerging big landlords, compradors, bureaucratic oligarchs, and financial-internet moguls represent reactionary relations of production that shackle productive forces, actively collude with foreign capital, and damage the foundational interests of the Chinese working class. 2. The Middle Class (National Bourgeoisie) This class represents urban and rural capitalist relations of production, primarily comprising the national bourgeoisie and numbering around 400 million people. It must be bifurcated into upper and lower segments:

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• The Upper Middle Class: Controls substantial means of production, often organized as family enterprises—the typical small and medium enterprise owners ("petty bosses"). One portion relies on local bureaucracy; lacking political leverage, they act as obedient retainers to bureaucratic power in hopes of ascending into the big bourgeoisie. Another portion serves as downstream suppliers to big monopoly capital, striving merely to preserve their wealth for their heirs. They possess high consumer purchasing power but face structural risks of downward slippage.

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• The Lower Middle Class: High-tier professionals dispersed across sectors: senior professors, renowned surgeons, elite lawyers, corporate executives, and cultural celebrities. While wielding specialized knowledge to serve power elites—often placing them in tension with ordinary workers—they simultaneously represent the aspirational ceiling for ordinary working-class mobility. Cultural and athletic celebrities command outsized incomes and combine their fame with venture capital, frequently intermarrying with the big bourgeoisie. Caught amid domestic and external economic headwinds, this entire class easily loses confidence and lives in constant dread of class degradation. Consequently, they vacillate regarding socialist modernization; they are quintessential centrists, exhibiting the strongest desire to transfer assets and emigrate abroad. As common prosperity initiatives deepen, these centrists will polarize: either aligning with balanced social development or veering sharply to the right. 3. The Petty Bourgeoisie Encompasses owner-peasants, artisan craftspeople, junior intellectuals, petty shopkeepers, primary/secondary school teachers, paralegals, micro-influencers, gig freelancers, middle managers, and white-collar mental proletarians. Benefiting from higher education during China’s economic ascent, this demographic demands close attention regarding both sheer numbers and political tendencies. The petty bourgeoisie is divided into three distinct segments:

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• The Right Wing (Those with Annual Surpluses): Energetic, engaged in mental or physical labor, they manage to generate savings each year. Highly preoccupied with personal enrichment and reverence for the God of Wealth, their greatest ambition is scaling into the middle class. Junior academics strive to become tenured authorities, young lawyers dream of founding firms, and individual merchants aspire to build commercial companies. They mimic middle-class lifestyle patterns, place great faith in market meritocracy and official policies, and enthusiastically pursue wealth-generating avenues. They form a numerical minority within the petty bourgeoisie and tend to hold skeptical attitudes toward redistributive socialist policies.

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• The Centrists (Economically Self-Sufficient): Capable of sustaining basic self-sufficiency, but highly vulnerable to inflation, economic stagnation, real estate declines, and sudden crises. They aspire to prosper, yet harsh reality denies them rapid mobility. Following three years of the pandemic and intensifying global turbulence, they feel their former working intensity can no longer sustain their previous living standards. Forced into vicious workplace "involution" (burnout, long hours, and multi-job moonlighting), they grumble about policy failures and predatory elites while maintaining a vacillating, neutral stance toward long-term modernization plans.

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• The Left Wing (Those Facing Declining Living Standards): Experiencing acute economic deterioration and burdened by debt, their psychological distress is intense when contrasting their present with the past. Exemplified by educated graduates from modest backgrounds entering an austere job market: unable to secure middle-class status yet desperate to avoid falling into the raw underclass, they harbor deep revulsion against capitalist exploitation and social injustice. Sympathizing with the laboring masses, they actively identify as proletarians and dominate internet discourse. While their views can be volatile, their intellectual training makes them the intellectual vanguard of online cultural critique. They constitute a vital contingent for national transformation. The petty bourgeoisie exhibits intrinsic fervor coupled with chronic political weakness: "The temper of the petty bourgeois is to look at strength and policy; if your power is great, he acts militant." When confronted with systemic difficulties, they easily swing between ultra-left and right extremes, chasing opportunism. Seeking social mobility, many enter the Party, inadvertently importing commercial commodification logic into political institutions. They can only be forged into a positive force through patient ideological remolding and education, ensuring the Party preserves its unblemished proletarian character rather than retaining proletarian form while becoming petty-bourgeois in essence. 4. The Semi-Proletariat Comprises small craftspeople, shop clerks, low-level office clerks, street vendors, and urban service workers. Struggling to establish a foothold in cities, they hold zero bargaining power in social distribution. Abandoning personal dreams of climbing into the petty bourgeoisie, they project immense upward aspirations onto their children. Bound by modest incomes, their cultural consumption remains conservative, and they harbor instinctive aversion toward decadent lifestyle displays. Most college graduates who face market realities gradually transition from youthful radicalism into the conservative posture of the upper semi-proletariat. Should socioeconomic conditions deteriorate, they risk dropping into absolute precarity, becoming a volatile source of social unrest and institutional distrust. They are a core contingent that must be won over through expanded employment security and mobility channels. 5. The Modern Proletariat With industrial expansion, China's modern proletariat has grown exponentially. It primarily consists of industrial manufacturing workers in sweatshops, construction crews, and rural migrant laborers—frequently denigrated by elite discourse as "low-end population." They endure raw exploitation: producing immense material wealth while receiving meager subsistence wages. The more intensely they labor, the greater the surplus appropriated by private capital. The rural migrant workforce is vast, totaling roughly 300 million in 2022, including 170 million working in cities away from their home provinces. Concentrated in the most arduous tasks as temporary, expendable labor, they are subject to constant job turnover and wage theft (necessitating perennial administrative decrees against unpaid migrant wages around the Lunar New Year). The industrial proletariat remains the representative of advanced productive forces and the leading class of socialist modernization. Deprived of the means of production and concentrated in collective urban hubs, they have no illusions of speculative enrichment and no retreat; their class consciousness and organized capacity must be systematically cultivated. 6. The Peasantry While traditionally classified as semi-proletarian poor peasants, contemporary rural dynamics have transformed under modernization campaigns. The countryside has polarized into new-type rich peasants and non-rich peasants:

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• New-Type Rich Peasants: Function as rural agrarian capitalists, combining commercial capital and wage-labor exploitation. While initially demonstrating efficiency in early rural commercialization, their negative traits—speculation, monopolization of cooperative resources, and ruthless pursuit of profit—inevitably surface. Rich peasants tread the capitalist road; socialist revolution aims ultimately to eliminate the rich-peasant economy. If rich-peasant ideology and its agents penetrate rural governance, they inflict grave damage on collective rural revival.

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• Non-Rich Peasants (The Vast Majority): Peasants who lack independent productive scale, holding tiny family plots or receiving meager rents from land transfers. In 2022, rural per-capita disposable income was 20,133 yuan (heavily supplemented by remittances from migrant labor); income derived purely from tillage is often merely several thousand yuan. Compounded by acute rural aging—one-third of rural residents exceed age 55—vast tracts of land sit idle. This vast agrarian mass remains our most dependable ally, whose productive initiative must be emancipated by curbing rich-peasant monopolies. 7. The Lumpenproletariat Encompasses the marginalized urban unemployed, economic compradors, and ideological lumpen—epitomized by reactionary "public intellectuals" (gongzhi):

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• The Disenfranchised Underclass: Deprived of stable livelihoods and organization, they oscillate on legal margins, easily manipulated by criminal networks or upper elites. They require institutional stabilization through steady employment rather than one-time bureaucratic charity.

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• The "Public Intellectual" Stratum (Spiritual Lumpen): Operates as cultural proxies for imperialist ideological infiltration. As Chairman Mao presciently observed, revisionism easily festers within journalism and liberal arts faculties. These individuals are not authentic scholars, but opportunistic mercenaries cloaked in academia. Driven by mercenary opportunism, they oppose socialism, mock national sovereignty, and disseminate historical nihilism whenever paid to do so. They must be ideologically repelled by awakening public class consciousness and dismantling bourgeois idealist historical narratives.

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• Economic Compradors: Function as economic lumpen elements, representing the alliance between foreign imperialism and local reactionary elites. Bureaucratic compradors collaborate with transnational capital to reduce China to economic dependency, serving as the modern root of treasonous fifth columns.

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IV. Conclusion: Distinguishing Friend from Foe in the New Era

To summarize:

• The emerging landlord class, transnational compradors, new-type rich peasants, the right-wing monopoly bourgeoisie, and the reactionary intelligentsia serving them constitute forces requiring rigorous ideological and political struggle.

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• The industrial proletariat remains the leading class of our cause, and the non-rich peasantry is our most steadfast, reliable ally.

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• The semi-proletariat and petty bourgeoisie are our closest friends and foundational forces of unity.

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• The patriotic left-wing of the middle class can act as our friend, but their vacillating, individualistic nature requires continuous guidance and struggle to prevent them from destabilizing our collective advance. Conducting class analysis in the new era is not aimed at arbitrary physical liquidation, but at forging conscious solidarity for genuine progress. When handled properly under a sound socialist legal system, the exploitative contradictions between the working class and the national bourgeoisie can be managed as non-antagonistic contradictions solved through peaceful, constitutional means. As Chairman Mao warned: if we fail to adopt a policy of unity, criticism, and education, or if the bourgeoisie refuses this path, the contradiction will inevitably revert into an antagonistic struggle between enemies and ourselves. Above all, genuine Marxists must maintain vigilance against bourgeois infiltration into the Party apparatus. In eras prioritizing economic construction, class struggle is easily forgotten, allowing bourgeois opportunists to infiltrate the state machinery, capture key power nodes, and subvert the socialist nature of the state from within. By holding fast to class analysis as our guiding compass, we maintain an uncompromising Marxist standpoint, unleash productive forces for the whole people, advance along the genuine road of common prosperity, and ensure that the working masses are the true masters of society. Comrades! Unite in struggle to build a modern socialist country in all respects—the Internationale shall be the human race!

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(Written in 2024 as a re-reading and reflection on Mao Zedong's foundational 1925 treatise, "Analysis of the Classes in Chinese Society.")