Live in a city near China's coast, and in a capital. (Coal doesn't hurt.)
BY Warner Brown
Foreign Policy - MAY 12, 2014
HANGHAI -- Conversations about China have long stopped asking
if decades
of breakneck growth have
widened the gap between rich and poor. English-language media is now
more likely to focus on whether the country's inequality is
merely
as deplorable as the United States', or if it has already
joined Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa to become one of the globe's
most socially-stratified places. The map below gives a vivid picture of that (click any image to enlarge):
China's inequality is
regional, as it is in many large countries. Terms like "wealthy coastal provinces" and "impoverished interior"
are now well-worn sayings in any China hand's phrasebook. Most English-language
discussions of China's regional inequality stop there, or at most focus on
differences between the country's 31 provincial-level regions. The risk of
overlooking finer-grained trends looms large, given that many Chinese provinces
are larger than entire countries in both size and population.
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