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

China's rapid economic growth has expanded the urban middle class and intensive material consumption as both a marker of social status and a source of environmental strain. Meanwhile, some consumers increasingly embrace post-material values such as environemntalism and simplicity, creating tensions in everyday pratices. 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 broader transformations in both status norms and material infrastructure. Our study contributes to our understanding of sustainable consumption in emerging economies and the sociology of consumption literature by highlighting the dynamic and contested formation of practical understandings in changing practices.