I adopt the estimates provided in Khan and Riskin (2005) who directly compared the Gini coefficient for China with that of other countries, including the United States. According to them, the recent Gini coefficient for the United States is 40.8. If this is the threshold, China crossed it sometime in the early 1990s. China's Gini was 38.2 in 1988 and 45.2 in 1995 (Khan and Riskin 1998). In 1980, China's Gini was 28 (Khan and Riskin 2001
