China has 32 times fewer A9 households than the US中美都有多少A8、A9和A10家庭？

China has about 120,000 households with a hundred million yuan in assets; the US has 1.1 million, and in the ten-million-yuan tier American families are 24 times more likely to qualify.

A slang has taken over Chinese social media: A8, A9, A10. The A stands for assets, and the number is how many digits the family's assets run to.

First, the code

A8 means eight digits — ten million yuan. A9 is a hundred million; A10 is a billion. Decimals go finer: A8.3 is thirty million. And yes, the home you live in counts.

So how many such households does China have? About 2.06 million at A8, or 0.5%. Around 120,000 at A9, or 0.025%. Roughly 20,000 at A10, or 0.003%.

Put another way, you would meet an A9 about once in every 4,000 people — which is the author's point: an ordinary person is very unlikely to run into one.

What the US looks like

Convert American household wealth into yuan and the picture shifts: the A8 threshold is $1.5 million, and 16 million US households clear it — 12%.

A9 starts at $15 million: 1.1 million households, or 0.8%. A10 starts at $150 million: about 13,000 households, 0.01%.

Compare: at A8, American families are 24 times more likely to qualify. At A9 the gap is 32 times. At A10 it narrows to 3.3 times.

The higher you go, the smaller the gap — the middle tier is where the two countries diverge most.

The piece closes with US household net worth: a mean of $1.1 million against a median of just $220,000. The average is five times the midpoint, which tells you how tightly wealth sits in a few hands. The top 1% starts at $14 million, 1.3 million households.

One average is enough to fool most readers.