China’s middle class is now bigger than America’s middle class

Reuters

Flash cars are one symbol of China’s new wealth.

The Chinese middle class has grown to outnumber the U.S. middle class for the first time, with 109 million Chinese adults now counted in that category compared with 92 million American adults, according to a Credit Suisse report.

China now accounts for a fifth of the world’s population, and holds nearly 10% of global wealth, the bank said in its sixth annual Global Wealth Report published Thursday.

“The Chinese middle class is now, for the first time, the world’s largest,” said the report.

China’s wealth growth is especially impressive when viewed over a longer time frame. In 2000, the country’s wealth was similar to that of the U.S. circa 1939, the report found. By 2015, it had expanded to the level of the U.S. in 1972, effectively accomplishing a 33-year leap in less than half the time. Household wealth in China is expected to continue to exceed the growth rate of developed economies, putting it on track to create 2.3 million millionaires by 2020, a 74% increase from today.

The U.S. is still the country with the highest number of millionaires and is home to roughly half of all the millionaires in the world with the stronger dollar helping to push it ahead of Europe.

“Still, the middle class will continue to expand in emerging economies overall, with a lion’s share of that growth to occur in Asia,” Credit Suisse Chief Executive Tidjane Thiam said in a statement. “As a result, we will see changing consumption patterns as well as societal changes as, historically, the middle class has acted as an agent of stability and prosperity.”

Other findings include that the wealth gap has continued to widen in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, with rising equity and other asset prices in developed countries increasing the wealth of some of the richest.

The top percentile of wealth holders now controls more than half the worlds' wealth.

“While the distribution of wealth is skewed towards the wealthy, the considerable economic importance of the base and middle sections [of a wealth pyramid] should not be overlooked,” said Thiam. Together, those sections account for $39 trillion in wealth and the consumption of a wide range of goods and financial services, he said.