The Xinhua News Agency reported that the top 10 percent of the richest people earned 23 times more than the poorest 10 percent of people in 2007 - up from 7.3 times in 1988]
Cong Yaping and Li Changjiu, economic analysts with Xinhua's Center of World Studies, warned that China's Gini Coefficient - an indicator of income inequality - has exceeded 0.5, threatening poor economic security, a weaker development outlook and social instability, the Xinhua-owned Economic Information Daily newspaper reported last week. The warning threshold, as commonly recognized by the international community, of the Gini Coefficient is 0.4. A World Bank report said the index for China surged to 0.47 last year.[Source: Global Times, Guo Qiang, May 27, 2010]
Yang Yiyong, director of the Social Development Research Department at the NDRC, warned that China can't afford any further rises in the Gini Index, as growing disparity could result in social unrest and ‘could even cause distrust in the country's public-ownership economic system.’ ‘Social problems, including migrant workers consecutively taking their lives and serial attacks on schoolchildren, are related to conflicts stemming from the income gap,’ Yang said. Yang's words referred to seven unrelated attacks on primary school and kindergarten students in less than two months in 2010, in which more than a dozen children were killed. “ [Ibid]
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Most Chinese are better off than they were 20 years but many remain unsatisfied, envious and worried about their future. One rickshaw driver from Anhui Province, who had no home in Beijing at the time of the Olympics in 2008 and either slept in his rickshaw or on a bench at the Forbidden City, told the New York Times, “The only happy thing is to have money. You don’t have bitterness. You don’t have to feel tired.”
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Reasons for Female Suicides in China
Common reasons for the suicides include unfaithful husbands, disputes over money. Canadian psychiatrist Dr. Michael Phillips told the Independent that he believed that one third to one half of female suicides "are impulsive acts that do not have an underlying major depression." Philips also believes that seeing people on television living better lives than one's own may also be a factor in the suicides.