China’s official GINI coefficient doesn’t include grey income (e.g. that official making 10k RMB/month yet driving a black Audi A9). Well, they stopped reporting it in the early part of this decade when it started getting really bad.
There are always reporting problems, especially tracking the wealth of the extreme rich. Estimates of hidden income and wealth are in the trillions. Gini in both China and the US are likely worse in actuality. But when you're in the middle of the process of converting your economy from rural to modern then it's much easier to swing the Gini change in the more equal direction.
But because it's a different situation and harder to change in the US, doesn't mean we shouldn't be strongly aware of the implications of its worsening in the US.
They stopped reporting their gini coefficient number altogether. There are no numbers after 2012.
I lived in a Chinese first tier city for 10 years. Income inequality was much more obvious there than I ever saw in the states (even in the boonies of Mississippi). A lot of that was related to china’s caste/hukou system that basically denies social services to migrant workers.
Yes, the USA has first world income inequality problems. But China has third world ones.
The joke goes: the USA has so many homeless people, they are just everywhere! China has no homeless people, because the police beat them pretty harshly so they are either dead or really good at hiding.
