China’s wealth gap widens (3)

Zheng said that low standards for labor and environmental protection have increased the wealth of the rich at the cost of the health and income of the poor.

The government needs to protect the property rights of low-income people, Zheng said, and he called for equal opportunities for smaller companies to enter all sectors.

Greater urbanization will ease the income gap, Pan Jiancheng, deputy director-general of the China Economic Monitoring & Analysis Center of the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), said at the survey release press conference, noting that China needs to boost economic transformation and improve social security.

China's official Gini coefficient was 0.412 for both rural and urban residents in 2000. Since then only the Gini data for rural areas had been released, standing at 0.3897 in 2011. An NBS report in December 2011 mentioned that the coefficient in 2010 was a bit higher than 0.412, without providing a specific number.

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