5 - Rich China, Poor China: Disparities and Inequalities

Summary

There are some inescapable truths about the transformation of Chinese lives over the past four decades. Hundreds of millions lifted themselves out of poverty, tens of millions became well off to affluent, and many millions are now rich, even super rich. The Chinese are indeed richer than they have ever been; they are also on average taller, healthier and fatter; they are better educated and more productive; and they have previously undreamed-of opportunities to travel within China and abroad. Materially, the Chinese live in a world of abundance compared with even the very recent past. But inequalities are starker too. These have the potential to destabilize and rip apart society. This chapter will explore these aspects of the social and material change that have accompanied four decades of rapid economic growth.

Every week in China in 2017 and 2018 four new dollar-denominated billionaires were minted (Hurun 2018, 2019). China had 819 billionaires in early 2018, 210 more than the previous year, and pulled further ahead of the United States's tally of 571. The US is still home to the richest in the world: Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffet, and Bill Gates head the global rich list. But Beijing is the world's billionaire capital. In 2018, the capital and seat of power for the Communist Party of China was home to 131 billionaires, 39 more than in New York; 10 cities in Greater China had 15 or more billionaires. Little would the 1980s reform leader Deng Xiaoping have imagined his fellow Chinese would embrace with such lust his call to get rich. Even less so, would he have imagined how his party comrades and their families would likewise enrich themselves at the expense of the state and citizenry. Looting of state assets by officials in collusion with private business was covered in the previous chapter. China is truly a country of peculiar dissonance and phenomenal disparities.

More detail on the life, careers and fortunes of the super-rich will follow next, but most of the chapter is devoted to the less extraordinary, focused on the disparities in income, education and health status that are the lived experience of ordinary Chinese.