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在线翻译:
szdaily -> Opinion -> 
Don’t pretend to be a rich country
    2015-10-26  08:53    Shenzhen Daily

    Lei Xiangping

    lagoon235@163.com

    THE Swiss Credit Bank on Oct. 13 issued its annual Global Wealth Report, which said that China, with a total family wealth of US$2.28 trillion, has overtaken Japan as the second-richest country, second only to the United States, and that the middle-class population has reached 109 million, the biggest in the world.

    These exciting data have caught the attention of Chinese media. As they have always done to hype China’s global rankings released by some foreign organizations, the media praised the report as commensurate with China’s power as the second-largest economy.

    However, the dim reality is that China is not as rich as the data may suggest. Pretending to be rich by exultingly accepting the report’s flattery is pure vainglory.

    The report predicts that before 2020, Chinese families’ total wealth will increase to US$3.6 trillion, accounting for 10.4 percent of the total global wealth. The number of Chinese millionaires will reach 2.32 million, taking 6th place in the world, according to the report.

    The report has given the Chinese a proud moment to feel the country’s prosperity, thanks to 30 years of high-speed growth. However, the wealth of Chinese people should not be overestimated because several crucial facts that have been missed out in the report may cloud China’s future:

    With a population of nearly 1.4 billion, China should be proud that rapid economic development in the past three decades has generated a middle-class group as big as 109 million. However, based on the poverty standard of the World Bank, there are over 200 million people living below the international poverty line, slightly fewer than India, which has the largest poor population.

    According to Chinese standards, there are 70 million people waiting to be lifted out of poverty. Also, thanks to the juvenility of China’s social welfare system, every year, hundreds of thousands of people who have just escaped from poverty might return to poverty because of illness and disasters.

    The second thing that deserves attention is that the Chinese middle class is fragile and is not as rich as its counterparts in developed countries. Chinese families’ wealth is mostly in the form of bank deposits and property, which have lower investment returns. Compared with middle-income families in developed countries, the percentage of Chinese families that choose to invest in securities, bonds, gold, etc. is small.

    As the housing market declines and the yuan further devalues against the dollar, the middle class’s overdependence on real estate and savings will pose great risks to their investment portfolio. Besides, too little cash in hand for consumption will not fuel growth.

    The third thing deserving of contemplation is the worsening distribution disparity. In 2014, the richest 11,000 people held almost 7.3 percent of China’s national wealth.

    

    It is common sense that the middle class should occupy a major percentage while the low-income and super-rich classes occupy a relatively small percentage of the total population if a country wants to remain stable.

    However, the middle class in China only takes up 11 percent of the total population, much lower than the world average of 13.9 percent and dwarfed by levels in developed countries. Some sociologists have attributed the increasing occurrence of social unrest in China in recent years to the worsening disparity of wealth distribution and immature development of the middle class.

    China is developing fast but remains the biggest developing country. Instead of resting on the label of “second-richest country,” China should take more practical measures to uproot poverty, expand the middle class and narrow the income gap.

    (The author is a News Desk editor with China Radio International.)

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