At present, China's social structure is like a reversed T-shape, which is an irrational social structure.

A man collects recyclable garbage next to girls relaxing in a park in Shanghai, in this picture taken May 9, 2004. The gap between rich and poor in Shanghai is widening rapidly although the economy of China's financial hub grew 13.5 per cent in the first quarter of the year. [Reuters]

Even if China started now to implement some strategies to speed up the urbanization and industrialization process, it might still take China at least 40 years to change this structure.

The statement was made by Li Qiang, director of the Human Science Department of the Beijing-based Tsinghua University when he recently gave a lecture to some young people working in public service institutions.

At the beginning of this year, Li first proposed his idea of the reversed T-shape social structure in one of his theses.

Based on the statistics in the fifth national population census, Li concluded that the social structure in China had undergone tremendous changes.

It was not the traditionally pyramid-shaped society, nor was it a spin-shaped society like some Western countries where the middle-class makes up the greater part of society.

The fact that China's society structure is now in a reversed T-shape reflects a serious fact: in China, the lower strata make up an irrationally large part of society.

Li said the direct reason for the reversed T-shaped social structure was the household registration system, under which structure the different social strata or the whole society were in a "stressed" status.

According to Li, the current Chinese society has several characteristics: the income gap between the poor and the rich is expanding; social wealth is controlled by a few people; the disparity between town and countryside and between different regions is becoming serious increasingly and the disparity problem also exists in both urban and rural areas; the low-income earners are marginalized from the mainstream society and the phenomenon of people gathering wealth by illegal means is quite common.

"Since 1979, disparity between the rich and the poor has kept expanding and from my point of view, such disparity has reached a relatively high level at present. This situation will remain so for some time to come before it becomes smaller," said Li.