Last month, Xi Jinping, the general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC), declared with great fanfare that China’s “battle against poverty has been comprehensively won,” which has been questioned by the outside world as the standard of China’s so-called “poverty eradication” is too low. According to an analysis, 2% of China’s rich people hold 80% of the society’s wealth, and the phenomenon of “the rich getting richer” has emerged.
An article entitled “The Wealth Structure of Chinese People from the Annual Report of China Merchants Bank” has recently gone viral on the Internet. The author analyzed the 2020 annual report of China Merchants Bank and found that customers with golden sunflower and above (financial assets above 500,000 yuan) accounted for 1.96% of the total number of customers, yet the total assets of this group of customers accounted for 82.15% of the total assets of the overall customers. In other words, clients of Golden Sunflower and above, who account for only 1.96%, hold 82.15% of the wealth.
Compared to 2019, the 1.84% of Sunflower and above clients hold 81.2% of the wealth, and both percentages have increased in 2020, which, according to the authors, indicates that China’s middle class is increasing, while the resources held by the middle class are also increasing rapidly.
If we further decompose the “golden sunflower clients” as China’s middle class and private banking clients as the richest people in China, i.e. the “rich”; if we consider the clients below the golden sunflower as ordinary people, we can find that the rich account for 0.06% and hold 31.03% of the wealth. 31.03% of the wealth, with average household assets of 27.7527 million yuan; the middle class accounts for 1.9%, holding 51.12% of the wealth, with average household assets of 1.25227 million yuan; ordinary people account for 98.04%, holding 17.85% of the wealth, with average household assets of only 10,300,000 yuan.
The average household asset of the richest people is more than two thousand times that of ordinary people. This is the real wealth distribution in China, from which we can see the problem of wealth gap.
In 2020, the growth of the number of ordinary customers, golden sunflower customers and private banking customers of China Merchants Bank is 9.58%, 16.98%, and 22.41%, respectively. And the growth of average household assets for the three types of customers is 3.41%, 1.38%, and 1.59%, respectively.
Both the number of the rich and the per capita assets grew faster than the middle class, indicating that the gap between the rich and the poor widened, not only for the rich and the poor, but the rich even further robbed the middle class of social resources.
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