Franco Guidi Photography

Shanghai Goes Pop! – The emergence of the new middle class

China’s society is changing very fast. At the basis of this sweeping social and economic transformation is the rise of an almighty new urban middle class.

This urban middle-class population alone, if considered as a country, is larger than the entire U.S. total population today and has been calculated to reach the number of 630 million by 2022, as a result of China’s new capitalist politics.

Following its new Chinese dream by 2022, we expect China’s middle class to be consuming goods and services valued at $3.4 trillion – 24% of GDP. This phenomenon is inevitably having an enormous influence on the US, Europe and the rest of the world’s businesses.

I spent several months in Shanghai documenting how the urban environment was rapidly changing and how this was affecting the Chinese identity in one of the fastest-growing cities in China.