

The latest figures from the Hurun Report show China’s billionaire lawmakers make US peers look like paupers, says Bloomberg News, and they’ve got the numbers to back them up. Try wrapping your head around these:

The richest 70 members of China’s legislature added more to their wealth last year than the combined net worth of all 535 members of the U.S. Congress, the president and his Cabinet, and the nine Supreme Court justices.

The net worth of the 70 richest delegates in China’s National People’s Congress, which opens its annual session on March 5, rose to 565.8 billion yuan ($89.8 billion) in 2011, a gain of $11.5 billion from 2010, according to figures from the Hurun Report, which tracks the country’s wealthy. That compares to the $7.5 billion net worth of all 660 top officials in the three branches of the U.S. government.

The wealth gap between legislatures holds with statistically comparable samples. The richest 2 percent of the NPC — 60 people — had an average wealth of $1.44 billion per person. The richest 2 percent of Congress — 11 members — had an average wealth of $323 million.

The wealthiest member of the U.S. Congress is Representative Darrell Issa, the California Republican who had a maximum wealth of $700.9 million in 2010, according to the center. If he were in China’s NPC, he would be ranked 40th. Per capita income in China is about one-sixth the U.S. level when adjusted for differences in purchasing power.



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