Hong Kong's rich got richer over the past five years and even the poor made more. But for people in the middle, it was not so good.
Middle-income earners - shut out of the private housing market by sky-high prices but earning too much to qualify for government assistance - were squeezed even harder, government statistics show.
Their incomes rose the least of the three groups between 2006 and last year, as the wealth gap became the widest in 20 years - and worst in the world, according to an international standard.
While the highest and the lowest earners both had increases of more than a sixth, incomes in the middle rose a little more than half that, the government figures show.
People in the middle are miserable and frustrated, said Professor Paul Yip Siu-fai, of the University of Hong Kong's department of social work and social administration and a member of the government's Central Policy Unit. 'The government always uses GDP per capita to measure average income, but that does not reveal the problem of uneven wealth distribution,' he said.
Yip said the latest figures, obtained by the South China Morning Post, further showed the city was at risk of turning into a so-called M-shaped society, with swelling numbers of rich and poor people and a diminishing middle class.