China has over 200 million middle class people

(PEOPLE'S DAILY ONLINE)The Chinese middle class has grown to outnumber the U.S. middle class for the first time, according to a China Household Finance Survey (CHFS) report in 2015.

There are 204 million Chinese with wealth of between $50,000 and $500,000. Meanwhile Chinese middle class has a total of 28.3 trillion US dollars, far exceeding that of the middle class in U.S and in Japan.

By the end of September 2015, Southwestern University of Finance and Economics finished the third round CHFS, which analyzed over 40,000 samples. Although the result shows that Chinese middle class has obvious advantages in terms of the overall scale, there are two features worth noting:

Firstly, wealth per adult of Chinese middle class is $139,000, which is lower than that in the U.S. ($184,000) and Japan ($157,000).

Secondly, the result shows that Chinese middle class accounts for 20.1 percent of the total population, well below the 37.7 percent of the U.S and 59.5 percent of Japan.

Moreover, 78.9 percent of adults in China have not yet met the criteria of middle class, which is net wealth of $50,000. If the structure of an ideal distribution of wealth looks like an "olive", then Japan is relatively closer to this model, but China's is more like an uneven "pyramid."

The survey result also shows that real estate had been a popular outlet for the wealth of the middle class in China. For the middle class in Japan and the U.S., they prefer to invest in financial market.