The Bloomberg News reports that China’s wealthiest people are hiding 80% of $1.4 trillion. That leaves about 280 billion for the rest of China’s people to hide.
Bloomberg calls this “gray” income and lists all the possible “illegal or quasi-illegal” ways it may have been earned.
When the piece mentions that the wealth gap between China’s rich and poor may lead to social unrest threatening the rule of the Communist Party, this may be true, since the real cause of the Tiananmen Square Protests of 1989 was due to corrupt government officials lining their pockets at the expense of the worker.
In fact, it should come as no surprise that reducing this income disparity is a top goal of China’s current president and prime minister.
However, the same problem is happening in the United States. “Millionaires in the U.S. and Canada saw their wealth increase 15 percent in 2009, to a total of 4.6 trillion dollars.” Source: 7Bends
Then there is the fact that the gap between the rich and poor grows in the US too.
“Since the 1990s, 40 percent of the increased wealth went into the pockets of the rich minority, while only 1 percent went to the poor majority.” Source: China’s Report on US Human Rights Record in 2000 Information Office of China’s State Council
Also in the US, the FBI estimates that that white-collar crime costs the US more than $300 billion annually.
The grim facts about income disparity between the wealthy and the working people means both the US and China have similar challenges—to create jobs for the worker that pay adequate wages.
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Lloyd Lofthouse is the award-winning author of the concubine saga, My Splendid Concubine & Our Hart. When you love a Chinese woman, you marry her family and culture too.
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