Middle-class Chinese pretty happy with government, actually

But economic growth alone does not explain the widespread aversion to political change one hears among intellectuals and professionals. For the country’s 70 million party members and the growing business class, the current arrangement delivers enormous advantages to those who play by the rules. The benefits can include low-interest loans from state banks and the forbearance of an all-powerful bureaucracy that could quash a company trying to start up outside the privileged club of state-owned behemoths.

The current setup fosters allegiance to the party, even if it is based on the survival instinct and not a small dollop of greed. Li Fan, director of the World and China Institute, a nongovernmental group in Beijing that studies political reform, said electoral democracy would threaten the benefits entrepreneurial elites enjoy under the current system. “Those who have prospered from economic reform have no interest in sharing power or the spoils of prosperity with those beneath them,” he said.

The same can be said of the 300 million members of China’s growing middle class, many of whom subscribe to the belief that universal suffrage would overempower their impoverished rural brethren.