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I think a lot of you are making many assumptions about China, and to my knowledge, they are wrong. China doesn't have a middle class per se. They have rich, and they have poor, and they don't have much in between. What we from the outside see as a middle class is actually their rich/wealthy class (I'm not talking about the mega wealth, because they have their Buffet, Walton, etc. equivalents)... it just happens that with three times the population of the U.S., their rich are about as numerous as our middle class. They have a huge sense of entitlement, they want the best they can buy, they want to consume at the same rate as Americans, and they have the capital to do so (with hundreds of slave laborers for ever one of them, they certainly should).
I dated a girl from China who was very clear about this: Chinese people come to America because the education is cheap and their money goes further. She was here living a modest lifestyle: just bought a new car, renting an apartment in a very good neighborhood, out to eat and parting every night, etc. Based on her salary here (~$40,000-$50,000/year), she couldn't afford that same lifestyle in China. Furthermore, she couldn't even afford to live in the city at all, even if she were living an actual, modest lifestyle.
Make no mistake. The people in China who are consuming aren't the working class. It's the people making five-USD-digits a month or more, and they feel VERY entitled.
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