Naked Capitalism has published the article Capital Accumulation, Private Property, and Inequality in China, 1978-2015.
To summarise, the level of inequality in China in the late 1970s used to be less than the European average – closer to those observed in the most egalitarian Nordic countries – but it is now approaching a level that is almost comparable with the US.
Just as I suspected, China has adopted some of the worst aspects of capitalism as well as some good aspects. The lower income earners are still making some progress, unlike what we see in the USA. The government of China will probably be able to sustain itself in power as long as the lower income earners continue to see progress. As that progress diminishes, and wealth gets more concentrated at the top, that is when we might see more open rebellion in China.
One key difference to note is from the following excerpt:
China has ceased to be communist, but is not entirely capitalist; it should rather be viewed as a mixed economy with a strong public ownership component. In effect, the share of public property in China today (30%) is higher than in the West during the mixed economy regime of the post-WW2 decades (around 15%-25%), but not hugely so. And while the share of public property in national wealth has declined to 0%, or even less than 0%, in Western countries (with public debt exceeding public assets in the US, UK, Japan, and Italy today), the public’s share of national wealth in China seems to have strengthened since the 2008 financial crisis.
As long as there is significant public ownership of wealth, China may still be able enforce some semblance of economic justice. The USA has passed up on an obvious way to increase public ownership of wealth in the USA. If the Social Security Trust fund were able to invest in the stock of publicly owned companies in the USA, our corporations might not be so pressed to maximize profits no matter what the cost to society. (I am not talking about individuals investing their share of the Social Security Trust Fund at retail costs in the stock market. I am talking about investing at the Trust Fund level where the funds are still aggregated and invested by professional pension fund experts at wholesale costs.)