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Sense of security falls as income gap widens: China poll

Chinese citizens' sense of security has fallen over the past three years as the country's yawning wealth gap widens further, state media said yesterday.

Referring to a survey by the Beijing-based Horizonkey, a private polling company, the China Youth Daily said Chinese people were feeling less secure as the income gap between cities and rural areas hits dangerous levels.

"Uneven social development, particularly the rich-poor gap between cities and villages, has led to all sorts of social conflicts," it quoted professor Wang Taiyuan (王太元) of the People's Public Security University, as saying.

The survey, released last month, interviewed 4,128 residents aged between 18 and 60 in eight cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, and seven rural towns and villages, according to Horizonkey's Web site.

On a scale of five with one indicating least secure and five indicating most secure, the level of the sense of social security among interviewees fell from 3.66 in 2003 to 3.53 last year.

According to the National Development and Reform Commission's report this month, the income gap had reached an "alarming and unreasonable level," with the poorest 20 percent of the urban population getting only 2.75 percent of the total urban income.
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