James Kynge

Of course, we know that it is only communist in name.

Egalitarian communism went out at least a couple of decades ago.

But if you look at the numbers, China is more of an unequal society than any of the capitalist G7 nations, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, UK, US.

It's more unequal than any of those countries.

I'll come to the statistics I'm using.

But my main point is here, why has it taken China so long to come up with an inheritance tax when it could use an inheritance tax to take money from the very rich when the patriarchs and the matriarchs of the rich families die?

they could use an inheritance tax to redistribute some of that enormous wealth to other people who need it much more.

And yet, as you said, Alice, China hasn't done this.

And so I really do wonder

about this.

So at the center of this topic, to me anyway, is the big question mark.

I don't know what your reflections would be, but before I throw it back to you, let me just give you some numbers.

The way in which wealth inequality is measured in a society is this Gini coefficient.

And there are various different data sets that come up with this.

And the Chinese government also used to publish the Gini coefficient from China.

And in 2021, the Gini coefficient showed that China was over what is 0.45.

That is...

put simply, a threshold that shows high inequality for a society, right?

The US, for comparison, was about 0.4.

So that's lower than China.