Navigating social and material challenges of sustainable consumption among the Chinese urban middle class: Environmentalism, simplicity, and frugality

作者：Danning Lu, Tianshu Ran · 发表于：Chinese Journal of Sociology · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1177/2057150x251371845 · 被引用次数：2

China's rapid economic growth has expanded the urban middle class and intensified material consumption, which functions both as a marker of social status and as a source of environmental strain. Meanwhile, some consumers increasingly embrace post-material values such as environmentalism and simplicity, creating tensions in everyday practices. Drawing on practice theories, this paper analyzes how middle-class Chinese practice sustainable consumption within these competing economic and cultural currents through forming new dispositions and rebranding of old ones. We conducted a seven-month-long participant observation, 41 in-depth interviews, and a survey of 500 people in China's largest social media-based sustainable lifestyle community, GoZero Waste. We identify environmentalism, simplicity, and frugality as the three main ideals that drive community members’ sustainable consumption practices. Facing challenges of limited infrastructure, status signaling through material well-being, and the poverty-related stigma of frugality, sustainable consumers cope with making pragmatic incremental changes and the reconstruction of non-material well-being against consumerism. They rebrand traditional values for sustainable consumption and gain support in the GoZero Waste community. We further provide a critical analysis of the conditions necessary for sustainable consumption that pertain to multiple scales. The adoption of sustainable consumption is likely to be challenging without broad...