This book tells readers the main changes and status on income inequality in China. Since China’s system reform and opening up, the Chinese economy has unprecedentedly developed for more than 40 years, and China has entered the new era with characteristic socialism that is being paid attention world-widely. At this time, it is necessary to carry out a systematic assessment of the degree and tendency of income inequality of Chinese residents, and to analyze and summarize the effect of the income distribution policy and economic development strategy implemented in China in past 40 years, and so to make an underlying judgment on the overall status of income inequality. Those are the core research task of this book. It is found in this book that each components of the income inequality of Chinese residents have all passed the vertex(turning point) of inverted-U curve of public ownership economy(POE), i.e. the total Gini coefficient of income distribution has entered the decreasing stage, which incorporates that urban inequality and rural inequality, and regional inequality and urban-rural gap began to decrease, middle-income groups gradually expanded, and the number of poor people were reduced on a large scale. It is true that the changes of all kinds of income inequality, especially the overall inequality, are still smaller and tentative in the light of different decreasing scope. The basic judgment of overall situation is that the income inequality of Chinese residents already stride over the turning point and began to enter the downward channel, although the declining extent is still small and fluctuant, and also the urban-rural gap, regional inequality, industries inequality and as well as the urban inequality and rural inequality are still large; the anti-poverty task is still arduous; and many shortcomings in people's livelihood field. After the publication of this book, the chief editor of Contemporary Economics Series, Chen Xin, said that it makes Chen’s POE inverted-U theory to turn out to be scientific from hypothesis. Indeed, just like professor Justin Yifu Lin, the former chief economist and deputy governor of the World Bank, the current dean of New Structural Economics Institute at Beijing University, praised that Professor Chen’s book discussed the very important inequality issues took placed in China recent decades and its substance may match each other with Capital In The 21th Century, a book written by a French economist, Thomas Piketty.
