Middle class wants children to study abroad: study

China's middle class was above 10 million in 2012, and 75 percent of them hope that their children will study abroad, according to a report jointly released by Forbeschina.com and CreditEase, a Beijing-based wealth management firm.

The two organizations issued a white paper on China's middle class on Thursday. According to it, the Chinese middle class includes those who have investable assets between $100,000 and $1 million.

The white paper said the majority of middle class people in China were born in the 1960s and 1970s, and more than two-thirds of China's middle class has a bachelor's degree or above.

Though they have lower interest in emigrating compared with richer people, three-quarters of them are considering sending their children to foreign schools.

Many reports have been published about China's super-rich — those with personal investable assets worth at least 6 million yuan — but few studies have been made on the middle class, which represents a larger slice of the population in China.

The white paper said that average investable assets held by the middle class are estimated at 1.33 million yuan ($214,010). This population in China has expanded from 7.94 million in 2010 to 10.26 million in 2012. The number is estimated to reach 12.02 million by the end of 2013.

Researchers received questionnaire responses from 1,196 people, to produce the white paper.

About 20 percent of them work in the finance and commerce sectors, while almost half of them accumulated their wealth in private companies, and some 27 percent in State-owned enterprises and State-affiliated organizations.