Per capita income of Chinese residents continues to grow

From 2011 to 2020, the per capita disposable income of Chinese residents saw an average annual growth of 7.2 percent in real terms after adjusting for inflation, according to official data.

The cumulative growth of the country’s per capita disposable income in real terms over the 10 years reached 100.8 percent.

In recent years, China has vigorously implemented pro-employment policies, providing a solid underpinning for continuous income growth of residents.

Employment is the cornerstone of people’s wellbeing, said Deng Quheng, a researcher with the Institute of Economics under the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, adding that the overall stability of China’s employment situation has helped guarantee steady income growth for Chinese residents.

Benefiting from favorable policies, Yongxin county in Ji’an, east China’s Jiangxi province, has improved people’s wellbeing by boosting the production of high-quality grain, oil, fruits and vegetables, and the development of industries including ecological farming, silkworm breeding and mulberry planting, as well as commercial trees cultivation.

The county has built over 180 large-scale industrial bases, with each covering an area of more than 100 mu (about 6.67 hectares). These bases have created jobs for nearly 50,000 rural residents of the county, and increased their per capita annual income by over 10,000 yuan ($1,549).

“About 5,000 to 10,000 kilograms of eggplants are taken to the market from here every afternoon,” Xiang Yongzheng, a man in charge of a fruit and vegetable industrial base in Yongxin county, told People’s Daily while more than 50 villagers were busy picking, packaging and loading eggplants onto trucks at the base.

Ouyang Xueji, one of the villagers working at the industrial base, earns nearly 20,000 yuan per year. Her family has transferred the land-use rights of 5 mu of land to the industrial base. The combined income is more than what the family can earn by growing crops on their own, according to Ouyang.

By cutting taxes for individuals, China has continuously eased burdens on residents and raised the actual income of its people.

In August 2018, China revised its Individual Income Tax Law which concerns the interests of hundreds of millions of taxpayers for the seventh time.

The revised Individual Income Tax Law raised the threshold for personal income tax exemption, added special expense deductions to China’s individual income tax system for the first time, and optimized the tail-raising factors of tax rate structure.

Data suggest that such policies have cut taxes worth 460.4 billion yuan for 250 million taxpayers, with the per capita tax cut reaching about 1,842 yuan.

The relative income gap between urban and rural residents in China has further narrowed as the country steadily reinvigorates its countryside, intensifies support for employment and entrepreneurship in rural areas, and strives to encourage rural residents to secure jobs in their hometowns.

In 2020, the nominal and actual growth rates of per capita disposable income of rural residents were 3.4 and 2.6 percentage points higher respectively than that of urban residents, and the ratio of urban-rural residents’ income shrank to 2.56 from 2.64 in the previous year.

China has built the world’s largest social security system, and continuously enhanced efforts to safeguard the wellbeing of its residents.

Data show that as of the end of 2020, China’s basic pension insurance had covered 999 million people, and the number of people who had been covered by the country’s basic medical insurance reached 1.36 billion.

The country has increased the basic pension for retirees for several years in a row, bringing them a stronger sense of gain, happiness and security.

Since Chinese economy boasts vast potential and strong resilience, and Chinese companies have gradually enhanced their innovation capacity, residents in the country enjoy strong guarantees of income growth and are bound to have higher income, said Chen Yuyu, a professor with Guanghua School of Management of Peking University.