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Strain spotting

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Wang Kun owns a successful import-export company in Dandong, Liaoning province, near the North Korean border. He's also in hospital, suffering from exhaustion and high blood pressure. And he hasn't even turned 40.

Like other mainland millionaires - of which there were about 236,000 last year - Wang is buckling under the pressures of running a company. 'Every day I have to meet so many clients and officials,' he says. 'My brain is overloaded.'

Yet even from his hospital bed, Wang is busy making calls to sell flats he owns in Beijing and Shanghai as he prepares to emigrate to Canada next year. Relaxation is a distant concept that he knows about but can't achieve.

'What I'd really like to do is go home and hang out with my wife, watch TV, and chat,' he says. 'That's how I relax. But I really can't. I don't have the time.'

Wang's dilemma is a familiar one on the mainland today. Sky-high stress levels, overeating and over-drinking at banquets and long hours of negotiations are producing a group of people who are thriving financially but poor in terms of well-being, according to a survey conducted by the country's biggest health examination company, Ciming Checkup. 'We stumbled on this by accident,' says Ciming director Han Xiaohong. 'We were discovering that the people who paid for the most expensive physicals had the worst results in terms of blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and so on.'

Last year, the company conducted about 500,000 physicals, costing from 300 yuan to 11,000 yuan each. Han, a doctor, examined the self-declared income brackets of her top-paying clients and found that of 183 company owners with assets of more than 10 million yuan, all had at least one health problem. Nearly half suffered from excess fats in the bloodstream; more than one in five had high blood pressure; and one in eight had high blood sugar. One-third of cases had abnormalities recorded on an electrocardiogram and two out of three suffered from neck or back pain. Each of the figures was above the national average for their age group, says Han.

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