Yao Yang · Full chronicle and history

Economist Yao Yang, Dean of the Dishui Lake Advanced School of Finance at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, said in a video posted on "Yao Yang Shuo" that about 100 million people in China actually pay individual income tax, that an annual income of 100,000 to 120,000 yuan puts one in the top 10% by income, and that an annual income of about 300,000 yuan puts one in the top 1%. The bottom 10% of earners account for only 0.4% of all income and have negative net wealth, and around 600 million people nationwide still earn less than 1,000 yuan per month.

At the Tsinghua Wudaokou Chief Economists Forum, four scholars—Lin Yifu, Yu Yongding, Yao Yang, and Li Xunlei—concentrated their efforts to call on the central government to adopt expansionary fiscal policies and bail out local government debt.

At the recent Tsinghua PBC School Forum, economists within the system, including Lin Yifu, Yu Yongding, Yao Yang, and Li Xunlei, rarely criticized economic policy en masse. Yu Yongding said the central government's books are clean while local governments are a complete mess, and called on the central government to issue bonds to replace local debt.