The Average Chinese, 2008–2026

Who funds the government. In China it is business, at least at the point of collection. Of ¥17.6 trillion in 2025 tax revenue (up 0.8%), domestic value-added tax supplied 39% and corporate income tax 23%; individual income tax was 9%, even after growing 11.5% in the year. Through August 2026, tax revenue is running 6.6% above a year earlier and individual income tax 14.5%. VAT replaced the old "business tax" on services in 2016, so that term in older sources means a specific abolished levy, not business taxation in general. The budget counts social insurance separately; on the OECD's all-in basis (2023) those contributions are the largest single line at about 32%, with employers typically contributing 20–28% of payroll. The US is the reverse: 50.5% of federal revenue is individual income tax and 33.6% payroll tax, against 9% from corporations. Two cautions. Who remits a tax is not who bears it: VAT is collected from firms but built into the prices households pay, so the Chinese consumer funds the state without seeing it. And taxes are only part of the picture: tax revenue was about 14% of GDP in the first half of 2025, down from 18% a decade earlier, and local governments have leaned on land-sale revenue, which sits outside these figures.

Prices vs pay. This is the mirror image of the US story. Chinese consumer prices rose only 22% over 2012–2025, and have been essentially flat since 2023 (0.2%, 0.2%, 0.0%), a mild deflation that Beijing is trying to escape. Urban wages, meanwhile, nearly tripled in nominal terms and more than doubled in real terms, growing about 10% a year through 2019 before slowing to 2.8% in 2024 and 4.3% in 2025. So the average Chinese worker gained far more purchasing power than the average American over the period, and yet feels worse about it, because the slowdown from 10% raises to 3–4% raises coincided with the property slump. The Big Mac tells the same story in one item: ¥12.5 in 2008 to ¥26 in 2026 (+108%), far more than the 38% rise in CPI over the same years, yet at about $3.70 it is still 40% cheaper than in the US, and a worker on the average urban wage covers it in roughly 25 minutes today versus 50 minutes in 2008. Note the wage series covers "non-private units" (state-owned, listed and foreign employers, about 170 million workers); private-sector wages are roughly 45% lower (¥71,590 in 2025) and grew more slowly.

Below the average. The NBS consumer confidence index fell from 124 in 2019 to 86 in 2024 and has barely recovered, a collapse with no parallel in the index's history, and it maps directly onto the PBOC's depositor survey, where the share of households saying they would rather save than spend or invest jumped from the mid-40s to 60%+ after 2020 and reached 64% in 2025. The youth panel shows where the pain concentrates: unemployment for 16–24-year-olds rose from 11% in 2018 to a 21% monthly peak in mid-2023, after which the NBS suspended and then redefined the series to exclude students; the new series still runs at 16–17%, three times the headline rate, and reached 18.9% in August 2026 as that year's graduates began looking for work, with about 12 million graduates a year entering a weak white-collar market. Credit stress is smaller than in the US but rising fast: card debt overdue six months or more grew from ¥15 billion in 2012 to ¥124 billion in 2024, banks have closed roughly 120 million cards since the 2022 peak, and the largest lender reported 4.6% of card debt non-performing at end-2025, up from 3.5% a year earlier.

Reading the trends. The 2013–2019 period is the "catch-up" decade: income doubled, the food share of spending fell below 30%, urbanization passed 60%, rail and air travel both doubled and online retail went from a novelty to a fifth of sales. 2020 marks a break. The saving rate jumped to 34% and has stayed above 31% since; household debt, which had quadrupled as a share of GDP on mortgages, stopped rising; births, which had already fallen from the 2016 two-child-policy peak, dropped by more than half; and the property market, the main store of household wealth, entered a multi-year slump. What kept growing through the downturn are the two structural shifts: NEVs took half the car market and online retail a quarter of the store.

Why it matters for the US comparison. The two countries are mirror images. The average American earns far more, saves little, borrows freely, holds wealth in a 401(k) and keeps spending; the average Chinese household earns much less, saves a third of it, owns its home outright, avoids the stock market and has been saving even more since 2020, which is the "weak domestic demand" problem Beijing keeps trying to fix. Where China is ahead is in adopting new habits: EVs, e-commerce, mobile payments and food delivery all run at two to five times US penetration.

Caveats. The NBS unified urban-rural household survey began in 2013; earlier income and consumption figures used separate urban and rural surveys and are not spliced here. The 2008 wage index and growth rates are from the same non-private-unit series (¥29,229 in 2008). China's statistics are per person rather than per household and come from a national household survey (about 160,000 households) that under-samples the very rich and migrant workers; the saving rate here is 1 minus consumption over disposable income from that survey, which runs lower than the flow-of-funds measure (~35–40%). The surveyed urban unemployment rate only exists from 2018 (the older "registered" rate is not comparable) and excludes rural residents. Homeownership and stock-account shares come from People's Bank of China and CSDC surveys rather than an annual series, so they are shown as tiles. Household debt/GDP is from BIS, rounded, and was restated on October 2, 2026 to the current BIS vintage, which runs one to two points lower in most years than the figures shown before. The 2026 points for youth and urban unemployment, consumer confidence and new-energy vehicles are January–August averages; some monthly readings were taken from news and data-aggregator reports of the NBS and CAAM releases rather than the original tables. Account ownership is the World Bank Global Findex, which runs every three years. The youth unemployment series has a break: through mid-2023 it covered all 16–24-year-olds including students; the NBS suspended publication in August 2023 and resumed in January 2024 with students excluded, so 2024–2026 values are not comparable with earlier years. The PBOC depositor survey and NBS confidence values are annual averages of quarterly and monthly readings, rounded. Credit-card overdue balances are from the PBOC's quarterly payment system reports, which stopped publishing the overdue line after 2024. Tax shares for 2025 are computed from the Ministry of Finance annual fiscal report (tax revenue ¥17.64 trillion, general public budget, excluding social insurance funds and land-sale revenue); "property and land taxes" sums deed, property, land-use, land value-added and farmland-occupation taxes, and "all other" nets import VAT, import consumption tax and customs (¥2.06 trillion) against export rebates (¥2.13 trillion). The 2023 panel uses the OECD's accounting, which counts social security contributions as tax and covers all levels of government; the US comparison panel is federal only, so the two are not strictly like for like. Birth and population figures are NBS year-end estimates; 2025 values are from the February 2026 statistical communiqué.