"At the top of the income ladder there's a large quantity of unrecorded income that is causing income disparity in China to grow. Urban families at the top ten percent of the income bracket are now making 31 times more than those at the bottom ten percent, and not the nine times that statistics previously indicated. In the rural areas the multiplier can reach 55, contradicting current statistics that put it at 21. China's actual income disparity far outstretches what current statistics show. Because data is insufficient, it's then hard to calculate the Gini coefficient, but it is clearly beyond the World Bank's calculation of 0.45."

This is one main conclusion from a report published by Caijing on May 28. It focused on grey income and income disparity, and the full text will be published in July's issue of Compare. The moment it was published by Caijing, it caused an uproar.

The night that Tengxun Network reprinted Caijing's summary online, it was viewed 20,000 times and received comments from 4,000 people.

"I read basically all of the comments," says Wang Xiaolu, author of the report. "The overwhelming majority approved of it, and had faith in the findings. They also were very dissatisfied with the income distribution gap and corruption. Some even felt the report didn't go far enough. Only a few disagreed, saying things like 'why are you bothering with this, it's worthless.' There were also those who swore, and even those who said that government corruption advances society. But the moment things like that appeared, many would immediately stand up against it."

Other websites successively reprinted the summary. The next day, commentators had varying opinions-- some attacked the report, some analyzed it. Some reputable scholars like Lang Xianping and Yi Xianrong copied the abstract onto their own personal websites or wrote responding articles. After Xiao Wanglu posted the abstract on his blog, the hits broke ten thousand in one day. For a scholar's blog, this something seldom seen.

Such an overwhelming response could not have come from something born easily. Regarding the difficulty involved in the report's preparation, Wang says, "It's like you're trying to be the National Bureau of Statistics, doing research according to a sampling pool in the tens of thousands. But if people don't report their illegal income to them, why would they tell you?" According to conventional standards, this kind of research was un-doable.