Construction workers take time out before the real estate billboard of a luxury apartment block they are building in Beijing

Vermilion wooden doors, gray brick walls and exquisitely carved marble items. The elements typical of traditional upper-class Chinese architecture have been replicated in the Courtyards on Canal Bank, a luxury residential area in Beijing, to reflect the wealth and status of its property owners.

The residential complex was rated as one of China's top 10 luxury estates this year. The promotional material claims that the bricks are made of volcanic rocks formed more than 100 million years ago and quarried from 1,000 meters below the ocean's surface. Many trees in the gardens are more than 100 years old and have been painstakingly transplanted from various locations across the country. It is said that every ginkgo tree in the gardens is worth more than $30,000. A single property here, between 350-3,500 square meters, costs between millions and tens of millions of dollars.

Although the prices are out of reach of the average people in China, they are quite affordable for the country's super rich.

Teeming with millionaires

More than three decades of economic boom in China has brought enormous wealth. From 1980 to 2013, China's GDP soared from $189.4 billion to more than $9.24 trillion, according to the World Bank's World Development Indicators data. That is to say, the national wealth multiplied approximately 49 times. Meanwhile, per-capita GDP also surged from $193 to $6,807, representing a 35-fold growth.

When initiating reform and opening up, the late leader of China, Deng Xiaoping, said that some people should be allowed to get rich first. In the 1980s, private businesses sprouted up. Now the richest citizens own fortunes in billions. On September 23, the Hurun Research Institute (HRI) released the Hurun China Rich List 2014. It says 354 Chinese residents own more than $1 billion, up 39 from last year. Ten years ago, the number was only three.

The Alibaba Group's founder Ma Yun was recently crowned the country's richest man. The recent initial public offering of the Alibaba Group on the New York Stock Exchange swelled his fortune to $25 billion, up five times on last year, according to the HRI.

Of the top 10 on the Hurun China Rich List 2014, five, including Baidu's founder Robin Li, Tencent Group's Pony Ma, JD.com's Liu Qiangdong and Xiaomi Technology's Lei Jun, made their money from Internet technology. Wealth gleaned from real estate has introduced two billionaires, Wanda Group's Wang Jianlin and Reignwood's Yan Bin, to the list whereas in 2013, six of the top 10 were in real estate.

On September 12, the HRI also published a report on China's high-net-worth individuals (HNWI), defined as people with net worth exceeding 10 million yuan ($1.6 million).

The report said these millionaires primarily consist of four types of people: private business owners, professional stock market investors, real estate investors and high-salaried corporate executives, who respectively accounted for 55, 10, 15 and 20 percent of the total.

According to the HRI, as of the end of 2013, China had a total of 1.09 million HNWIs, up 3.8 percent from the previous year. Among them, the number of super rich, defined as individuals with personal wealth of at least $16 million, reached 67,000.

Some of China's super rich are also among the wealthiest on this planet. According to Forbes, of the world's 1,645 billionaires in 2014, China accounts for 152, more than Russia's 111, and second only to the 492 of the United States.

Big gulf

But although the society has become much more affluent overall, the wealth has been distributed more unevenly.

By the UN's poverty standard, China had 128 million people still living under the poverty line.

Now the country's top 1 percent households own more than one-third of all wealth, whereas the bottom 25 percent own about 1 percent of the total, according to a report by Peking University's Institute of Social Science Survey in July.

The report said China's wealth inequality has surged in the past few decades. The Gini coefficient for wealth disparity increased from 0.45 in 1995 to 0.55 in 2002 and to 0.73 in 2012. A zero means complete equality, and one means absolute inequality. Some experts consider a Gini coefficient higher than 0.4 to be undesirable.

The report further revealed that Chinese households' consumption patterns are also polarized, with some living hedonistic lifestyles and some living very frugally.

Real estate accounts for a large share of Chinese households' wealth. The median percentage is 80 percent for urban households and 60 percent for rural households. The share of real estate in a household's total assets is higher in more economically advanced regions, and for high-income and affluent households, the report said.

China's wealth Gini coefficient is higher than income distribution. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the country's income Gini coefficient in 2013 was 0.473, lower than its record high of 0.491 in 2008.

Zhang Monan, an associate research fellow at the China Center for International Economic Exchanges, said that irrationalities in the distribution and redistribution systems have exacerbated wealth disparity. While discussing problems with China's income distribution system, she said the proportion of labor income and salary to the national income is low, with workers' pay much lower than that of executives. A salient problem with the income redistribution system is its "regressiveness" and lack of a mechanism to transfer the operating capital gains of state-owned enterprises to residents.

The main culprit

However, income inequality is not the main factor that has caused the wealth polarization in recent years, she added. "Real estate has played a far greater role than salary in allocating wealth."

As property prices soar, low-income groups can no longer afford to buy housing, and middle-income groups shoulder a proportionately heavier burden in paying mortgages, while property developers and local governments make huge profits, leading to wealth polarization, Zhang said.

Inequality cannot be corrected by the market, so the government should make policies to address it, said Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz in his lecture at Tsinghua University on March 25.

He said that China's inequality is the fastest growing in the world and suggested that China should impose capital gains tax, curb rent-seeking behaviors, and increase equality of opportunity.

According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy website, formal equality of opportunity requires that positions and posts that confer superior advantages should be open to all applicants. Applications should be assessed on their merits, and the applicant deemed most qualified according to appropriate criteria should be offered the position.

In China, the taxation on properties, especially on the properties of the "haves," is relatively low and cannot redistribute much wealth, said Zhang of the State Information Center. So far, China has not levied property tax at the national level though it has been piloted in such cities as Shanghai and Chongqing. She suggests that property tax, estate tax and gift tax be collected to regulate wealth distribution.

In recent years, the Central Government has made numerous efforts to guarantee the basic living standard for poverty-stricken people, such as giving them minimum living allowance, increasing minimum wages and lifting the threshold of personal income tax.

China's top leadership is engaged to reform the income distribution system and promote common prosperity, and to overhaul the fiscal and taxation systems so as to optimize resource allocation and promote social equity.

On August 29, a plan to adjust unreasonably high salaries of executives of some state-owned enterprises was approved. A real estate registration system is to be established, which is a necessary preparation for collecting property tax, according to observers.