On October 18, the 19th CPC National Congress was held in Beijing where president Xi Jinping delivered a report on behalf of the 18th CPC Central Committee stating that “as socialism with Chinese characteristics has entered a new era, the principal contradiction facing Chinese society has evolved. What we now face is the contradiction between unbalanced and inadequate development and the people’s ever-growing needs for a better life”. To get an expert opinion, Yangcheng Evening News interviewed IESR Associate Dean Sisi Zhang.

In her opinion, the inequality described in the report reflects the disparity between rich and poor, and the main reason for that lie in the nature of allocating assets among Chinese households which has long been focused on real estate. Furthermore, the dramatic growth of housing prices as well as interregional imbalance of house price growth are one of the key contributing factors to the further increase in wage disparity across households and regions.

As professor suggests, further diversification of household assets could reduce wage disparity, and one of the options to achieve this would be to encourage entrepreneurship to create business assets.