The gap between the average wages in China’s highest and lowest paid industrial sectors is now eleven to one, according to figures released by the National Bureau of Statistics on 9 April.

Despite the global financial crisis, the national average annual wage in 2008 increased by 17.2 percent (4, 297 yuan) compared with 2007, to stand at 29,229 yuan. Taking inflation into account, the real increase was around 11 percent. The overwhelming majority of wage increases were for employees earning over 2,000 yuan a month.

The highest paid sector was securities with an average annual salary of 172,123 yuan (six times the national average), followed by other financial activities (87,670 yuan) and the air transport industry (75,769 yuan). The lowest paid sector was timber processing at 15,663 yuan (55 percent of the national average) closely followed by textiles and food processing.

China’s official wage statistics are notoriously limited and misleading, however they can be used to gauge disparities between different sectors and in this regard clearly the rich are getting richer and the poor poorer. Wages in the badly hit textile and shoe and apparel industries increased by 17 percent and 11 percent respectively, while the securities and banking sectors increased by 20 percent and 27 percent.

The main limitation of the government’s official wage statistics is that they only include “staff and workers” (职工) a term that originated during the era of state planning and that was used to differentiate those employed in urban state-owned enterprises from rural labourers, etc. With the growth of the private economy over the last three decades, this classification has become increasingly anachronistic because it does not include persons employed in private enterprises, rural enterprises, laid-off workers and the self-employed. As such, the number of “staff and workers” in urban areas now only accounts for 40 percent of those actually employed in China’s cities.

The vast majority of China’s lowest paid workers, rural migrants, are not included in the official wage statistics, and as such the government’s national “average” is much higher than the real figure.