The gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen in China, pictured here on the streets of Beijing‘s central business district.
According to a new report released by Hurun Research Institute, an organization specializing in compiling China’s 100 richest people, the number of “rich families” with RMB 6 million in assets exceeded 5 million for the first Time in China, while the number of “high net worth families” with 10 million in assets reached 2.02 million. “The gap between the rich and the poor continues to widen, with the rich getting richer. Some analysts believe that attention should be paid to the source of wealth of the rich in China, and that the Communist Party’s powerful and wealthy families are not on the list.
In response to the latest report, Hu Ping, a former editor-in-chief of Beijing Spring magazine and a US-based political commentator, argued that it is not important to pay attention to how many billionaires there are in China, or that the gap between the rich and the poor has grown even wider.
Hu Ping said, “The gap between the rich and the poor in China is not only alarming, but it is also particularly bad in nature. Because the reason why the rich in China have that kind of huge wealth, most of them, a considerable majority of them, they have that kind of huge wealth not from the historical accumulation, nor from the superiority of the market, but from this kind of power trickery. This is not the case in other countries, that is, in other countries, whether it is the United States, Taiwan or ah, the wealthy people’s property is considered legitimate, is legal. The most important thing is that the wealthy people in China have their wealth from the wrong source, it is robbed by the power to grab it, this point in fact, once said through everyone knows.”
Hu Ping also cited two major plundering of the wealth of Chinese people after the Chinese Communist Party ruled China, which illustrates the problem of the origin of the wealth of the rich in China.
Hu Ping said: “The first plunder is our communist revolution to engage in communist ah, to defeat the landlords capitalists, then the landlords capitalists, people’s legitimate property, legitimate property to others snatched away. This is a plunder. Later is the reform, reform that is the official, using their power to divide the state property, divide the public property, the people’s name originally belonged to these properties into, for their own. So most of the rich people so rich, relying on power to get rich, so it comes from the wrong way, which is a more serious problem than the wealth gap itself.”
Hu Ping also stressed the point that many of the data released in China are not accurate and often intentionally mislead the public.
Hu Ping said: “Like some published materials it is not very descriptive, it just shows how big the gap is, but does not explain the nature of the gap is different, did not highlight this point. So that uh may also mislead others, in addition to some of the things published in China is actually inaccurate, because many powerful families their wealth they are, from the data is invisible. So you see every time what huge rich rich, rich list Zhang San Li Si, in fact, there are a group of people may be richer than them, but they are never on the list, you see those senior officials in China, the Family of senior officials that is very rich, but their names do not appear on the rich list. So that’s something to keep in mind as well.”
The latest report also shows that the total wealth of “rich families” in China with RMB 6 million in assets is 146 trillion yuan. Of that 146 trillion yuan, 17 trillion yuan is expected to be passed on to the next generation within 10 years, 42 trillion yuan within 20 years and 78 trillion yuan within 30 years.
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