China house prices rise, but momentum cools

Of 70 cities tracked in the survey, 56 reported gains in new home prices. That compared to a more modest performance in March that saw prices in 49 cities rising month-on-month.

New home prices in Beijing were up 0.1% in April from the prior month, while Shanghai reported a 0.3% rise, according to reports citing the National Bureau of Statistics data.

Guangzhou, the capital China’s southern Guangdong province, and Shenzhen, a fast-growing metropolis that lies just outside Hong Kong, each saw prices rises 0.7%.

Chinese millionaires are younger than their American counterparts

According Hurun, the average Chinese millionaire is 39 years old, a full 15 years younger than your average millionaire in the US. There’s around 960,000 millionaires in China, a land of 1.4 billion inhabitants. And while China is a central planned economy and pragmatically socialist, 55% of the country’s millionaires are making money the old fashioned way — they earned it in private business. Another 20% have entered the world of China millionaire stardom through the country’s hot real estate market, and another 15% or stock market gurus, Hurun said in the executive summary to its May 12 report. More surprisingly, 30% of China’s millionaires were women.

China has gone through radical economic changes since the late 1970s when economic reforms began. The country tried its own communist brand of capitalism and over the last decade has grown by more than 9% on average, taking millions of Chinese nationals out of poverty, and millions more into the middle classes. Thousands of Chinese became millionaires in the last few years alone.