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Summary Although China's GDP has become the world's second largest, China's long-term economic growth with high speed and long-lasting “efficiency first” policy guidance, has brought China into a complicated situation, therein serious inequality exists in China and it has become one of the most serious problems in China nowadays. This paper focuses on China's inequality issues in the context of the world, especially on comparison between China and the European countries, concerning of our common pursuit for socialist values. Comparative method is widely used in the paper. Gini Coefficient and Percentage of Total Income of National Population by Income Quintile are utilized as main indicators, and the two results just mutually verify each other. We find that the huge inequality in China does not fit into the title of socialist country and its socialist extent is far less than the European's, even inferior to typical capitalist countries. Finally, we make a ladder target of the Gini coefficient standards for Chinese government to keep constraint by oneself.

This paper investigates the major drivers of governmental redistribution. Extended and harmonised data on effective redistribution recently provided by the newest version of the Standardized World Income Inequality Database allows for the assessment of the origins of governmental redistribution for a broad sample of countries. Our findings confirm the Meltzer-Richard hypothesis, pointing to a robust positive relationship between market inequality and redistribution. We show that perceptions of inequality are often biased and that the redistribution-enhancing effect of gross inequality is even stronger when individuals are aware of national income disparities. The results also suggest that top income shares tend to impede redistributive policies.