The View | China needs jobs for graduates and curb resentment about ‘connections’ to get ahead
Many commentators have long warned that greed and profiteering at the top would lead to the downfall of one-party rule in China
The rich are different then you and me. This could explain why authorities are worried that if a proposed cross-border sailing scheme between Guangdong and Hong Kong is launched, private yacht owners will make a sideline of smuggling stuff, even pregnant women.
“How would the authorities prevent pregnant mainlanders from visiting Hong Kong or smugglers going to Guangdong via private yachts?” Sunny Tao, a senior yacht salesman with Simpson Marine, was quoted in this paper as saying.
Sounds a bit of a stretch, but then keep in mind the latest title of Oxfam’s annual global wealth report: “Wealth: Having It All And Wanting More.”
Released to coincide with discussions at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week, Oxfam’s research shows that the world’s richest 1 per cent have seen their share of global wealth increase from 44 per cent in 2009 to 48 per cent in 2014, and at this rate will be more than 50 per cent in 2016.
China’s wealth gap is technically among the world’s highest, but as development spreads to the inland provinces, the country’s very high Gini coefficient, a measure of inequality, is predicted to decline.
“One can be optimistic: there are strong forces that may curb [Chinese inequality] in the future. We already see some first signs of it: from rising wages to the demand to extend the social safety net beyond urban state-sector workers,” the economist Branko Milanovic wrote in the Harvard Business Review early last year.
Indeed, income inequality has been declining in recent years in China, as wages for blue-collar jobs have been rising faster than wages for professional jobs.
