Power-Law Tail in the Chinese Wealth Distribution

We analyse the data from the recently published lists of the richest Chinese from the year 2003 to 2005. The results confirm that in these years the wealth is distributed according to a power law with exponents between 1.758 and 2.285 in the high end. The power distribution is found to be quite robust although the persons in the list change drastically and the wealth increases rapidly. The relation between the wealth and the absolute change of wealth rejects the notion that the wealth evolution is a multiplicative stochastic process.