Three snapshots from China’s next chapter

To fully grasp China’s future direction, it is essential to understand its new middle class. A huge wave of increasingly affluent consumers will constitute China’s urban majority in less than a decade. The rapid emergence of this prosperous, digitally savvy, individualistic, and sophisticated class of consumers is creating opportunities and challenges for the companies that serve them. This slideshow looks at this consumer and urbanization phenomenon by the numbers. To understand, for example, how Singles Day—China’s alternative to Valentine’s Day—dwarfs Cyber Monday in the United States in online sales revenue, look inside.