The chasm between China’s rich and poor has widened to alarming levels, according to survey results released by the Survey and Research Centre for China Household Finance.
The survey, released on Sunday, reported a rise in China’s Gini coefficient, a key yardstick of income or wealth inequality, to 0.61 in 2010, the latest year for which there is data on China.
That number is significantly higher than the global average of 0.44 and 50 per cent above the "risk level" for social unrest, the Beijing Times reported.
The figure was 0.56 for urban households and 0.60 for rural households.
Measured on a scale of 0 to 1, a Gini coefficient of 0 represents perfect equality in which everyone has the same income, and 1 represents maximal inequality in which just one person holds all the wealth.
Since China first published data on the Gini-coefficient in 2000, the official figure has stayed level at 0.412. In 2005, the World Bank put the figure at 0.425, the last year it published a Gini index for the country.