This paper examines the political behavior of China’s urban middle class during and after the 2022 Shanghai COVID-19 lockdown through a longitudinal digital ethnography of WeChat groups in a residential compound from 2022 to 2025. Extending an earlier study of “bounded resistance” during the lockdown crisis, this research tracks the evolution of community dynamics through the subsequent economic downturn. Contrary to theoretical expectations that middle-class expansion leads to political liberalization or that economic grievances catalyze collective resistance, the study finds that Shanghai’s middle class neither pushed for political change during prosperity nor mobilized against the state during decline. Instead, residents actively participated in maintaining social order through three mechanisms, namely surveillance-induced self-censorship, peer discipline against “defectors” who emigrated or sold property below market price, and displacement of economic anxieties onto inter-stratum conflicts between homeowners and renters, locals and migrants. I argue that China’s “middle class” functions in this context not as a unified political actor but as a fragmented aggregate defined by property ownership, without the shared interests or collective capacity that class-based theories assume. The concept of “cynical entrapment,” a condition where both exit and voice are systematically blocked, leaving neither genuine loyalty nor viable alternatives, helps explain the paradox of widespread grievance without mobilization. These findings contribute to debates

on authoritarian resilience by demonstrating how the Chinese state achieves stability through minimal intervention, leveraging social divisions and property-based identities to generate self-policing communities.