According to Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS), 85 percent of Chinese families can not afford housing expenditure, and house prices are much higher than their incomes [...]

China is going to expand schemes that give domestic consumers a discount if they trade in old cars and household appliances for new ones, said Chinese Vice Commerce Minister Jiang Zengwei [...]

Stimulus policies spurring Chinese domestic consumption will be maintained in 2010, while high sales growth of home appliances and automobiles due to the stimulus packages will not affect consumption, analysts predict [...]

To give us some perspective on the massive social and economic impact of pollution throughout China, Shanghaiist turned to photographer Lu Guang’s “Pollution in China” project. Lu won this year’s $30,000 W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanistic Photography from the Asia Society in New York. His project documents families, farmers, industrial districts, rivers, the countryside, cancer patients, children; anyone and everything affected by pollution across China [...]

Some Chinese who were educated abroad are coming home to try to better the country’s villages and cities [...]

China’s urban population surged to 607 million with an urbanization rate of 45.7 percent at the end of 2008, a social researcher revealed recently [...]

The Chinese State Council, or Cabinet, passed a long awaited medical reform plan which promised to spend 850 billion yuan (123 billion U.S. dollars) by 2011 to provide universal medical service to the country’s 1.3 billion population. The plan was studied and passed at a recent executive meeting of the Chinese State Council chaired by The Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, and has been deliberated by authorities since 2006…

About a third of Shanghai’s population with local residency would be aged 60 or above in 2020, while families in the city were getting smaller and with fewer children, the Shanghai Population and Family Planning Commission said recently. Shanghai is China’s most populous city, with 18.58 million residents in 2007. There were 6.6 million migrants in the city, including the 4.99 million staying in the city for more than six months…

The Chinese Association for Mental Health says young people aged between 15 and 34 are more likely to die at their own hand than by any other means. The suicide rate is reported to be higher in the countryside than cities, with more women taking their own lives.

According to the latest report of CCID Consulting, in the first half of 2008, China’s MP3 player market realized sales of about 2.5 million MP3 players and revenue of CNY1.223 billion (nearly 180 million US dollars), year-on-year decreases of 43.76% and 43.56%, respectively. Li Ying, a consultant from the consumer electronics industry research center of CCID Consulting, says that as the MP3 player markets in big Chinese cities are close to saturation, a negative growth began to appear in its sales in the first six months of 2008…