The vision of a xiaokang society is one in which most people are moderately well off and middle class, and in which economic prosperity is sufficient to move most of the Chinese population into comfortable means, but in which economic advancement is not the sole focus of society.
The current usage of the term also invokes ancient Chinese thought in support of modern Chinese Marxism. In ancient Chinese writing a xiaokang society was the predecessor to the great unity. There is a rough correspondence between this progression and the progression in Chinese Marxism between a market socialist society and world communism.
The revival of the concept of a xiaokang society was in part a criticism of Chinese social trends in the 1990s, who many in China felt was focusing too much on the newly rich and not enough on China's rural poor. Furthermore there has been a fear in some circles that Chinese society has become too materialistic placing material wealth above all other social needs.
In contrast to previous concepts such as the spiritual civilization and the campaigns against bourgeois liberalization in the 1980s, the concept of the xiaokang society does not involve heroic self-sacrifice and does not place the material and the spiritual in opposition. The vision of a xiaokang society sees the need for economic growth to provide prosperity, but it sees the need for this prosperity to be broadly distributed.
In addition, the concept of a xiaokang society is the first time in which the Communist Party of China has used a classical Chinese concept to legitimize its vision for the future of China.