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VOA: Income of the Top Groups in China Grew Rapidly; Gap between Rich and Poor Continued to Widen

The latest research shows that the gap between the rich and the poor in Chinese society continues to widen. In the past few decades, the fiscal income of the top groups has grown at an alarming rate and their proportion of the national income has almost doubled, making them the biggest beneficiary of China’s income growth.

The London School of Economics and Political Science issued a report on April 12. According to the report, it studied China’s recent public and non-public statistics, analyzed the income of Chinese society from 1978 to 2015, and drew the above conclusions. The report said that the ordinary Chinese people benefited from economic development and their incomes have greatly improved, but the gap between the rich and the poor has expanded significantly. It is worth noting that the proportion of the top income group, that is, those whose incomes are in the top one percent in China, accounted for only six percent of the income of the the entire population in 1978, but rose to about 14 percent in 2015, higher than the 10 percent in France, and second only to the 20 percent in the U.S. The distribution growth rate of China’s top one percent income group is the highest in the world for the 35 years of this period, reaching an alarming 8.6 percent, much higher than the US’s four percent and France’s 1.4 percent. The report found that China’s private wealth is also growing rapidly. By 2015, the growth rate of China’s private income had increased from 115 percent in 1978 to 487 percent, which has pushed China’s overall wealth income growth rate from 350 percent in 1978 to 700 percent in 2015.

Source: Voice of America, April 12, 2019
https://www.voachinese.com/a/china-inequality-more-like-us-12042019/4873853.html