(推荐)Chinas Growing Income Gap.doc

China’s Growing Income Gap Billions in unreported income for the wealthy and a system that blocks health and pension benefits for migrants mean the income gap is wider than acknowledged ByDexter Roberts It takes about three hours by bus from the glitzy malls of central Beijing to reach Yongfengtun, a farming village northwest of the capital that has quadrupled in population, to 20,000, over the past few years. Here one finds a gritty version of a Chinese bedroom community. Grimy storefronts advertise cheap clothing, shoes, and budget mobile-phone service. Mangy dogs root through piles of trash on the bicycle- and pedestrian-crowded streets. Yongfengtuns streets may be rundown, yet they attract thousands of migrant workers and the so-called ant tribe (cash-strapped urban youth) from across all China. Its cheap! says one 23-year-old, a recent college graduate who pays $39 a month for a 65-square-foot apartment. Heat costs money, he says ruefully as he kicks a pan of water for washing laundry that has frozen solid. There is no way I could afford an apartment in central Beijing, with rents probably 10 times higher for a comparable place, he says. Its not as if incomes are stagnant in China—anything but. In the first half of 2010 per capita income rose 13 percent in the countryside, to $935 a year, and 10 percent in the cities, to $2,965 a year. Nevertheless, swelling slums in the suburbs of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou attest to a yawning wealth discrepancy between thousands of newly minted rich and millions of poor. China already is showing levels of inequality comparable to the Philippines and Russia and is far less egalitarian than Japan, the U.S., and even Eastern Europe, according to Li Shi, an authority on income distribution trends at Beijing Normal University. Official figures show rural incomes are less than one-third those in cities, with the top 10 percent of urban Chinese earning about 23 times that of the poorest 10 percent—a ratio that is almost certai