A dissident on China's woes

A tidal wave of discontent threatens China | Wei Jingsheng - Times Online

The whole article is worth reading, but there was one point which surprised me:

China has a $2 trillion foreign currency reserve but it also suffers from a huge disparity between the rich and poor: while 0.4 per cent of the people hold 70 per cent of the wealth of the country, a fifth of the population - more than 300 million Chinese - have daily incomes of less than one dollar.

Now that's wealth disparity.

UPDATE: according to Wikipedia, the equivalent figures for the USA are:

...at the end of 2001, 10% of the population owned 71% of the wealth, and the top 1% controlled 38%. On the other hand, the bottom 40% owned less than 1% of the nation's wealth.

So, does this mean that wealth concentration is roughly 20 times worse in China than the US? Gosh. Good thing they are communist, or who know hows bad it could have been!