The People’s Republic of China—still nominally dedicated to the Marxist revolution that had founded it—was becoming nearly as unequal as the United States. Between 1978 and 2015, the top tenth of Chinese households15 saw its share of national income climb from 27 percent to 41 percent. Over the same period, earnings for the bottom half dropped from 27 percent of national income to 15 percent—just a tad more than the 12 percent brought home by their American counterparts.
