Forbes’ list of the world’s richest people in 2021 shows that 40% of the newly rich are from mainland China, and Beijing has beaten New York to become the city with the highest number of billionaires in the world. But at the same time, the gap between rich and poor in China is not encouraging, with 700 million people earning less than RMB 2,000 per month.
Although the global economy has been hit hard by the new crown epidemic, the number of people on the list is 2,755, including 493 newcomers, with a billionaire appearing almost every 17 hours. The team leader of the Forbes Rich List called it “a record-breaking year.
The Forbes Rich List is out, with 40% of the newest billionaires coming from mainland China
The world’s top ten billionaires, except for the third and tenth from France, India, the rest are produced by the United States. Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, is the world’s richest man for the fourth consecutive year with $177 billion in assets. Tesla founder Elon Musk came in second with $151 billion.
In terms of total numbers, China has 698 billionaires, close to the 742 in the United States.
Beijing added 33 billionaires last year, bringing its total to 100, narrowly beating New York. New York, with 99 billionaires, has been at the top of the list for the past seven years.
Qin Weiping, a U.S.-based Chinese economist, told the station, “New York’s total wealth still exceeds Beijing’s by $80 billion. The faster concentration of wealth to a few indicates that more ordinary people are losing their wealth, there is a certain imbalance in the social structure, and the gap between rich and poor is getting bigger. Those standing in front of the stage are actually the white gloves of the powerful, and the real rich in China will always be a mystery. For example, cadres above the provincial and ministerial level, deputies to the National People’s Congress, (if you add these invisible rich China) may far exceed the rich in the United States.”
During the epidemic, China’s wealthy sulked
According to the Forbes ranking, the number of billionaires from mainland China jumped to 626. More than 40 percent of the new faces on this year’s list are from mainland China, with 10 percent coming from the healthcare industry, and manufacturing and technology are also popular avenues of wealth, such as Wang Ying of Misty Core Technology and Liu Fangyi of Intco Medical, among others.
According to a Forbes analysis, the reasons behind this are the strong performance of the Chinese economy, the fact that China’s medical industry has provided the world with the kits and medical supplies needed to contain the epidemic, and the fact that capital market reforms have made it easier to go public.
Qin Weiping: “During the epidemic, online consumption and entertainment industries formed a better development, and people relied more on these industries to meet their life and spiritual needs. The medical industry has an abnormal supply and demand relationship behind it, such as medical supplies like masks. The blood, sweat and consumption of countless ordinary people add to the rich and powerful. These tycoons should take more social responsibility and do more charity work.”
The top three highest-ranking Chinese billionaires in the world are Zhong Glittering, founder of Nongfu Mountain Spring ($68.9 billion), Ma Huateng, founder of Tencent ($65.8 billion) and Huang Zheng, founder of Poundland ($55.3 billion), ranked 13th, 15th and 21st, respectively.
They were followed by Alibaba’s Jack Ma ($48.4 billion), Shunfeng Holdings’ Wang Wei ($39 billion), Midea’s He Xiangjian and his family ($37.7 billion), Byte Jump’s Zhang Yiming ($35.6 billion) and the diversified Li Ka-shing ($33.7 billion).
China’s wealthy far outnumber the U.S. but why are they more modest? (Photo by Radio Free Asia)
China has a huge gap between rich and poor, with 700 million people earning less than $2,000 a month
Song Xiaowu, director of the Academic Committee of the China Society for Economic System Reform, said at the China Development High-Level Forum in late March that the income distribution gap on the mainland is still relatively large in the world, with the Gini coefficient hovering at 0.46 or 0.47 for a long time, reaching about 0.50 at high times.
“There are 720 million people with a monthly income of less than 2,000, and most of the migrant workers are among this group. A farmworker family is counted as three people, and the migrant worker group affects the consumption of 700 to 800 million people.”
He also mentioned that social security in the secondary distribution helps to narrow the primary distribution gap, but while developed countries can generally narrow it by 20-25 percentage points, China’s narrowing figure is only between 8 and 12 percentage points.
Liao Cheng, a Chinese citizen from Harbin, told the station that the Chinese model has been used to maintain a glossy facade of defense, infrastructure, and elite wealth at the expense of the elderly, state-owned monopolies, and violent exploitation. “The proliferation of Chinese tycoons in Forbes only proves that the people at the bottom are being exploited even more.
“The birth of so many rich people is not the glory of China. Chinese farmers and self-employed people have no pensions in their old age, cannot afford to cure their illnesses, cannot afford to go to school, have poor working conditions, toxic food, and dark medical education. The power of the government has allowed these monopolies to monopolize most of the market, and the vast majority of the people at the bottom have piled up these tycoons to their own detriment. China is not the free market economy of the United States that benefits people and themselves.”
Recently a truck driver was fined two thousand dollars for the Beidou positioning offline and drank pesticide to commit suicide, which is a rare thing in Liao Cheng’s career as a driver, “the car was carded and punished, and the usual privileged exploitation is too serious. The burden of migrant workers and self-employed, how many times higher than the normal country, the profit is minimal, survival is incredibly difficult.”
He comes from a peasant family and used to work as a farmer, caterer and driver. In the seventies Liao Cheng’s annual income was about three thousand dollars, and in 2006 he started driving a truck, earning two to three thousand dollars a month. The social insurance he enjoys, on the other hand, is high in fees and low in coverage. A surgery cost more than four thousand dollars, and rural health insurance ended up reimbursing only five hundred dollars; his mother once suffered from a minor illness but was over-treated, hospitalized for fifteen days and charged six thousand dollars.
“The U.S. is a market economy, where the wages and benefits of the common people and food prices can provide a better quality of life for the vast majority of people. China’s absolute power leads to absolute corruption. If the government did not impose a monopoly,relaxed the approval, all kinds of good people and religious people (give) money widely, such as Sun Dawu to run hospitals and education, it could eliminate the black hospitals and black education.”
China announced last year that it had succeeded in eradicating poverty and had entered a new journey of “common prosperity”, claiming to have made substantial progress in achieving the goal of common prosperity for all people by 2035.
Deng Xiaoping once gave an indefinite blank check to the people with the idea that “the rich first will lead to the rich later”. According to Liao Cheng, “common prosperity must have a prerequisite for a private and competitive economy and a multi-party political campaign. Without these necessary conditions, common wealth is a lie to the people.”
Recent Comments