China ranks first in the world in both total labor volume and labor participation rate. This is according to the latest data released some time ago by the U.S. National Bureau of Statistics.

What is total labor volume? It refers to the sum of the working hours of everyone who is employed. What is the labor participation rate? It refers to the percentage of the entire population that is engaged in work.

So exactly how high is China's labor participation rate? It reaches 76%—meaning only 24% of people are sitting idle at home, and that 24% includes the elderly, young children, and students.

By comparison, the United States stands at only 65%, Japan at only 58%; only Brazil comes close to competing with China, at 70%, while India's labor participation rate is as low as 55%—meaning nearly half of its population chooses to stay home rather than go out to work.

What does it mean that China ranks first in the world in both total labor volume and labor participation rate? It means the Chinese are the hardest-working people on Earth.

One foreigner studying in China complained on Zhihu: “A terrifying 76% labor participation rate—don't you Chinese people ever need to rest?”

Even Ronald Coase, the Nobel laureate in economics, marveled in his book How China Became Capitalist: “The industriousness of the Chinese people astonishes the world, puts it to shame, and even inspires a certain fear.”

Although the Chinese are the hardest-working people in the world, and China's GDP ranks second globally, by comparison, the income levels of ordinary people are seriously mismatched with this reality.

On May 28, 2020, then-Premier Li Keqiang revealed at the closing of the CCP's “Two Sessions” that China has “600 million people in the low-and-middle-income bracket or below, whose average monthly income is only around 1,000 yuan.” In other words, low-income groups make up half of China's entire population. A survey by Beijing Normal University's China Institute for Income Distribution found that 220 million people in China earn a monthly income below 500 yuan—meaning that 220 million Chinese people live on less than $3 a day.

In addition, independent scholar Liu Zhirong has revealed that China's minimum annual income is less than 15% of the world average, ranking 159th globally.

Furthermore, the most recently published statistics show that the average monthly pension for rural elderly people in China is a mere 123 yuan. Across the vast rural areas of central and western China, hundreds of millions of farmers still live on a monthly pension of around 100 yuan.

So here is the question: if the Chinese people are the hardest-working in the world, and China's GDP ranks second globally, why are ordinary Chinese people's incomes so low, so seriously out of step with these facts?

Consider the following data:

According to the China Statistical Yearbook 2024, China's total wage bill in 2023 was 19.74167 trillion yuan, with total employment of 740.41 million people in 2023, yielding an average annual wage income of only 26,600 yuan. Based on this data, total wages account for only 15.66% of China's GDP—far below developed countries, and on par with, or even below, the level seen in Africa.

The fact that wage income accounts for such a low share of GDP in China shows that a very high proportion of the wealth created by laborers is being taken by the government.

What does the government do with it?

First, it hands out lavish foreign aid. According to a report by the Party-run Xinhua News Agency, the CCP's total foreign aid in 2024 reached a staggering 1.288 trillion yuan, surpassing the United States and firmly securing first place globally.

Second, it goes toward military spending. China's military budget currently holds a solid second place worldwide.

Third, it goes toward “stability maintenance.” Reports some years ago noted that China's stability-maintenance budget had even surpassed its military budget.

The CCP government's own administrative expenditures also rank first in the world.

And of course, CCP officials and their families also carve off enormous sums of wealth for themselves through corruption and by “harvesting the leeks.”

In short, although the Chinese people are the hardest-working people on Earth, creating the second-largest amount of wealth in the world, most of that wealth is taken and spent by the CCP, which creates none of it itself. This is the root cause of why ordinary Chinese people's incomes have never been able to rise—and why 600 million Chinese people have an average monthly income of only around 1,000 yuan, while 220 million Chinese people live on less than $3 a day.