A look at wealth in China: its magnitude, how it’s being spent and invested, and the yawning inequality gap that has only grown in the Xi era.
Customers at a Dior cosmetics shop in Sanya city, Hainan province, September 27, 2014. Credit: Imaginechina via AP Images
How have China’s wealthiest fared amid the pandemic and Xi Jinping’s drive for common prosperity? Rather well, according to two reports which suggest that China’s rich have only gotten richer.
The top 0.001 percent of China’s population — or about 14,000 people — now own close to 10 percent of national wealth, up from 6 percent in 2016, according to a new report by the World Inequality Lab, a research center at the Paris School of Economics co-led by the economist Thomas Piketty. Billionaires possess almost twice the amount of wealth held by the bottom half of the Chinese population.
Those findings are supported by the latest data from the Hurun Report, an organization that keeps tabs on China’s wealthiest. The data shows that China produced a record number of millionaires last year, with their aggregate wealth growing by 27 percent.
This week, The Wire looks at wealth in China: its magnitude, how it’s being spent and invested, and the yawning ineq
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