Stand outside the Printemps department store in Shanghai. Through the crowd of migrant workers with dirt stuck to their trousers and sturdy housewives with bags of cabbage, young women walk with styled hair, carefully matched colours and a glow of self-confidence.
This is the face of Shanghai's middle class, backbone of the city before 1949, who are making a comeback after decades of 'class struggle' and attempts to wipe out their culture.
Like the middle class elsewhere in the world, its members earn several times the average wage, enjoy bars, classical music and travelling abroad and are at ease with foreigners.
These urbane sophisticates are a product of growing affluence in China's wealthiest city and spend their money more discreetly than the nouveau riche who flaunt their wealth on imported cars, extravagant meals and 'little wives' with heavy make-up and short skirts.
Shanghai had the biggest and most influential middle class in China before 1949, when the communists confiscated most of its assets and condemned its bourgeois values.
But the economic renaissance of the city has resulted in the rebirth of this class. Its chronicler is writer Cheng Naisan, who has taken it as the subject of her 14 novels.
