Photo: Liang Wengen
The numbers making news around China during the week of April 29, 2013
450,000 yuan
Cars valued at over 450,000 yuan will no longer be allowed to carry military license plates, according to new regulations that went into effect May 1. Bloomberg
$45,000
The price that military license plates good for six years can sometimes fetch on the black market. New York Times
5.73 trillion yuan
The discrepancy between the sum of all provincial GDP figures and the national figure calculated by the central government in 2012. This gap is the largest ever, and equivalent to 11 percent of China’s GDP. The Atlantic
66 percent
Proportion of WeChat users who say they’ll discontinue using the service if it begins charging a fee. The Diplomat
$9.3 billion
Net worth of Liang Wengen, chairman of Sany Heavy Industry. He made $3.4 billion in 2012 to surpass Baidu’s Robin Li as China’s richest man. The Diplomat
30,000
Number of workers at The China Banknote Printing and Minting Corp, which runs 80 production lines to print China’s currency. Even when accounting for the size of China’s economy, it has five times as much cash in circulation as the US. New York Times
12.8 percent
Proportion of new life insurance policy sales in Hong Kong that came from Mainland Chinese customers last year. This is up from 4 percent in 2010. South China Morning Post
53 percent
The Chinese Red Cross claimed that donations to its organization accounted for 53 percent of all donations to disaster relief organizations within one week of the Sichuan earthquake. However, there have been accusations of government departments requiring their employees to make donations. Tea Leaf Nation