Asking a person how much he earns is considered as rude as asking a woman her age. But not on the Internet!

China's professionals are detailing their salaries under acquired names on the Net as Spring Festival approaches. Most urban Chinese have got their salaries and year-end bonuses by now, with many of them joining the Shaigongzi, or "Salary Show", to let anyone interested to know what their after-tax pay packets are.

Google the key words gong zi tiao, Chinese for "pay slip", and you get 286,000 results in a twentieth of a second. And key them on Baidu, the largest Chinese search engine, to get 1.12 million results in one-thousandth of a second.

Reportedly started by a group of white collar workers, posting salary details on the Net is fast becoming a craze. Some post them to share their excitement; others to vent their frustration.

"I need a new job! My bills are piling up for rent, telephone, water and power," says a netizen named Alibaba, who works for an advertising agency in Shandong Province and has an after-tax income of 20,000 yuan ($2,564) a year.

But for "Mr Song", an employee of a foreign enterprise in Shenzhen, the display is self congratulatory. "With an annual income of at least 580,000 yuan ($74,454), my wife and I are quite well off. My company pays for our accommodation and car, so I can say I have nothing to worry about," he writes.

Sohu, a leading Chinese Internet portal, categorizes pay slips by occupation, and civil servants, bank employees, foreign trade agents, securities analysts and executives of listed companies have got the most clicks.

"Besides flaunting their income or complaining (about the lack of it), most people are eager to know what others in their profession get, and if they can keep up with them," says Sun Yuxiao, a psychiatrist with Beijing Bo'ai Counseling and Psychotherapy Center.

Since income is a sensitive subject, the anonymous "Salary Show" provides a convenient "database" that all can access, Sun says.

Pay slips used to be transparent under the planned economy because salaries were paid according to technical rank, with each earning a fixed sum.

But with China's transformation into a market economy, companies prefer to keep salaries and bonuses confidential and use them as an incentive.

According to Sohu.com's Finance Channel, the best paid jobs are in telecommunication firms and foreign enterprises in East China, with monthly after-tax incomes of 7,000 to 10,000 yuan ($897 to $1,282 ).

Tax bureaus, banks, industrial and commercial firms, customs and financial institutions are the moderate payers: 2,000 to 3,000 yuan ($256-385) a month. The lowest paid jobs are of middle-school teachers and civil servants in western China, with the after-tax salaries being 800 to 1,000 yuan ($103-128).

Official figures show the average annual income of city and town residents last year hit $1,740. Since Net users in China tend to be young and well educated, it's possible that their average salary exceeds the official figures, says Wu Xin, an IT firm employee in Beijing who gets 3,600 yuan ($461) a month after tax.

Xinhua

(China Daily 01/31/2007 page3)