Nebulous, hard to pin down, China's middle class is not easy to get a handle on, business, academia, advertising, all have different definitions of what constitutes the middle class.

The China National Research Association (CNRA) under the auspices of the National Bureau of Statistics of China framed six criteria for middle-class status during a 2006 lifestyle survey of China's "new middle class": education, salary, profession, societal influence, savings and holidays. Interestingly, they set the benchmark monthly salary at 2,000 yuan.

In the same year, a McKinsey Global Institute report, From Made in China to Sold in China: The Rise of the Chinese Urban Consumer, defined the Chinese middle class as people whose annual incomes, in terms of purchasing power, were between around 91,000 and 365,000 yuan.