Wealth inequality in China is getting worse as 1 percent of households nationwide own one-third of the nation’s total assets, according to a 2015…

Wealth inequality in China is getting worse as 1 percent of households nationwide own one-third of the nation’s total assets, according to a 2015 report on the recent development of the livelihoods of Chinese families

The report, conducted by the Institute of Social Science Surveys of Peking University, collected information from 14,960 families residing in 25 provinces and cities

Families ranking in the top 1 percent in terms of overall wealth possessed about one-third of the country’s total assets, while families ranking in the bottom 25 percent possessed only 1 percent of the country’s assets, read the report

According to a previous report conducted by the same institute in 2014, the average Chinese family’s assets in 2012 were valued at 439,000 yuan ($66,596). The families ranked in the top 1 percent possessed an average of 3 million yuan in assets, while about 25 percent of families possessed less than 63,000 yuan in assets in 2012

China’s Gini coefficient - an index of income or wealth distribution in which 0 represents perfect equality and 1 represents maximum inequality - has surged from 0.3 in the 1980s to 0.49 in 2012, well above the warning level of 0.4 set by the UN. The Gini index of household assets also rose from 0.45 in 1995 to 0.73 in 2012, according to the 2015 report

Residential real estate dominates the composition of household assets. The 2015 report showed that housing accounted for 75 percent of an average family’s assets in China, while housing accounted for 80 percent of total household assets for urban families

The report said that economic inequality worsened with the increase in the country’s total wealth, which was reflected in inequality of income, education, healthcare and other social welfare measures. "These problems, if tackled improperly, will threaten social stability and may evolve into a bottleneck for the development of China’s social economy," the report read

Hu Xingdou, a political science professor at the Beijing Institute of Technology, told the Global Times that China’s wealth gap will continue to widen in the near future

Unreasonable government expenditures that distribute insufficient healthcare and social security subsidies to people, especially rural residents, form one of the causes of the widening wealth gap, coupled with a less developed charity field, Hu said

Corruption, which can easily result from too much government interference in the market, also contributes to the gap’s growth, he added. Hu said the government has to devote more effort and funding to poverty reduction to bridge the wealth gap and provide rural elderly people with more necessities

As of the end of 2014, 70.17 million of China’s rural residents lived below the country’s poverty line, which was set at 2,800 yuan in annual income