The per-capita disposable income of the country’s urban households rose 11.5 percent year on year in the first three months to 4,386 yuan (about US$ 626.6). However, after counting in inflation, the growth slowed to 3.4 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) announced on recently.

The growth reflected a deceleration of 13.2 percentage points compared with the same January to March period a year earlier. It was the lowest first-quarter figure since 1997, when urban income edged up 1.2 percent amid high commodity prices.

Zhang Xiaojing, an expert with the Institute of Economics of Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said the government should try to increase people’s earnings with the commodity prices being at high levels, or the living standard would go down.

The statistics were based on the calculation of a NBS survey result, which covered 59,000 urban households nationwide.

China’s inflation, measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI), was up 8 percent in the first quarter. In February, the index rose 8.7 percent above the same period a year earlier, a 12-year high, but eased to 8.3 percent in March.

The income index for the second quarter of this year set a record low of 114.8 points, 3.8 points lower than that of the first quarter and 7.5 points lower than the last quarter of 2007, according to the survey on consumption confidence conducted by Shanghai University of Finance and Economics (SUFE).

Among the 1,000 surveyed, 13.3 percent said their income shrank over the past year, 4.4 percent higher that that of the first quarter. People’s employment expectation index dropped by 23.5 to stand at 84.7 points, and 35.9 percent of the surveyed were pessimistic about job opportunities in the second half of the year.

In addition, 62.6 percent Shanghai citizens thought it was not a good time to buy houses right now, and 55.7 percent would not consider buying one this year.

The survey also shows that about half of the surveyed were negative about buying cars either now or in the second half of the year.

However, official statistics showed that the annual per capita disposable income in Shanghai’s urban areas last year increased by 14.3 percent as against that of 2006, and that in rural areas increased by 11 percent year on year.

The Chinese stock markets have fallen drastically since October last year, while the consumer price index has continued to rise, both hitting people’s incomes, according to Xu Guoxiang, professor of economics with SUFE.

Issued every five years, the report said there were a total of 119,876 expatriates living in the city in 2006, compared to 61,610 in 2002. The number of expats working in foreign-invested companies in the city increased from 40,076 to 76,873 over the same period.

The report found local workers’ average salary increased 11 percent annually between 2002 and 2006. The annual wage of local workers on average reached 29,569 yuan (US$4,224) in 2006.

But the report also said the average monthly salary had gone up 9.1 percent between 2006 and April last year to 2,687 yuan.

The number of local workers who were paid less than 2,000 yuan every month decreased from 83.2 percent to 58.1 percent between 2002 and 2006.

The report said the number of workers in the service industry increased four-fold over the past five years, the number in the financial industry increased 65 percent, and the number of real estate industry professionals rose 36 percent from 2002 to 2006.

Those working in state-owned enterprises dropped by 31.7 percent, while the number of staff in foreign-invested companies and Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan enterprises increased 25.6 percent. The survey covered nearly 4,000 local employees.

The report, released by leading human-resources service provider Zhaopin.com in Shanghai, was based on a survey of more than 1,000 companies across all sectors throughout the country last year.

It found workers in the financial industry were paid an average salary of 4,987 yuan (US$694) per month. The figure is about 40 percent higher than the national average.

“The stock market in the Chinese mainland had undergone deeper reform and it remained hot last year. That contributed to the salary rises in the financial sector,” said Liu Hao, Zhaopin’s CEO.

Liu said it was not unusual to see fund managers and analysts earning more than one million yuan a year.

The high-tech sector ranked second on the list. Average income in the information technology industry also reached 4,282 yuan (around 600 US dollars) por month last year, the report said. As comparison, the average salary of a software engineer in San Francisco — California — goes around 9700 US dollars a month.

“Leading enterprises like electronic commerce and the online gaming industry drove the whole industry towards fast growth,” Liu said, adding that more than half of the enterprises used long-term incentive salary policies.

Third on the list was the real-estate industry, where salaries jumped by 15 percent on average to 4,051 yuan (around 570 US dollars) per month last year.

Zhaopin analysts said that industry growth in second-tier cities such as Tianjin, Dalian, Shenyang, Changsha and Wuhan largely contributed to the rise in average wages.

Also high on the earnings list were employees in the media and public relations, motoring, consumer goods, medicine, energy, and the chemical and manufacturing industries.

The report also revealed that new college graduates were paid 2,169 yuan (around 300 US dollars) per month on average in major Chinese cities. Masters degree graduates were paid on average 2,853 yuan (a little over 400 US dollars) per month and PhD graduates earned 3,878 (around 540 US dollars) yuan por month.

The survey statistics show that by the end of Nov. 2007, the number of blog spaces has reached 72.82 million in China, while that of blog writers has totaled 47 million, which means that one out of every 30 Chinese, or one out of four netizens writes blogs. Also, the active blog writers have taken up 36% of the total blog writers, approximately 17 million, and the number of valid blog spaces of the active blog users is 28.75 million.

China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) surveyed 1,862 Internet users in late November. Extrapolating from this group, CNNIC calculated that 47 million Chinese have blogged, more than one fourth of the 180 million people who have surfed the net in China. But many blogs have gone blank: only a persistent 36 percent kept their sites updated.

Although small compared with the 1.3 billion population of China, the active blogger population has doubled almost every year. China’s first blog appeared in 2002; by the end of 2006, China had 17.5 million bloggers, nearly 30 million more than that of last year. 47% of the blogs’ main contents are the author’s mind or mood monologue record, followed by contents describing personal life and hobbies. Most blogs are for bloggers to record their own living conditions, and conducting self-display.

A large proportion of Chinese bloggers are assumed to be students, as the survey showed that more than 30 percent of them earned less than 500 yuan (68.50 U.S. dollars) each month or had no income at all. About 23 percent earned 1,500 to 3,000 yuan, which is the monthly entry-level salary of many white-collar employees in China.

People working in the information technology industry earned more than employees in all other industries on average last year, according to the Shanghai Statistics Bureau.

They were followed by workers in the finance, electricity, gas and water, real estate and scientific research sectors.

The wage gap between different sectors widened last year. The average wage in the IT sector was 3.55 times of the average salary for those in the service sector, the lowest paid group of workers, while in 2000, the average wage in the highest sector was 3.24 times that of the lowest.

From 2000 to 2006, wages in the manufacturing industry grew 13.3 percent annually, and wages for the service sector grew 14.6 percent. Local employees earned 29,569 yuan (US$3,937) a year on average last year, up 10.2 percent from a year earlier. The city’s average salary has grown at an annual rate of 10 percent in recent years, with yearly income reaching 26,820 yuan in 2005 and 24,396 yuan in 2004.