It's a nice start but i think they can do better. How about next year they cut that down to 2 million yuan and the year after to 1 million. That's still plenty more than do-nothing parasitic financial speculators should be getting. And include private firms too.
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If it works fine and it's really retroactive they can always retroactively do that too.
Either way, It's a nice solution that people might not even talk much about because it always looks impossible but hopefully they do something like this to show the world it can be done and hopefully they continue it with things like 100% taxes for billionaries and lower the minimum threshold of wealth with time as well.
Edit for clarification.
It looks like this started in 2022 for state-owned/state-invested financial corporations due new policies, but the pay cap seems to have always been an unconfirmed rumour that started from 50m to 15m and now 3m.
As for the part about applying this retroactively, here's a new term I learnt from this: clawback, a situation in which a government or company takes back money that it has already paid. Known as 绩效薪酬追索扣回机制, such mechanisms seem to have been introduced in China back in 2010 for commercial banks, and expanded in 2021 to banking and insurance institutions. Clawback basically takes back money from performance-based salary or bonuses and not basic salary.
A quick search on Baidu with the term "退薪" (return salary) shows that state-owned banks have already invoked this clawback mechanism in the past year or two, here are some related English news articles:
China Merchants Bank to Recover USD8.3 Million in Staff Bonuses to Rein In Risk
China’s banks cut salaries, rescind bonuses amid economic slowdown and Beijing’s financial reshuffle
When the news mentions recover/rescind bonuses that's probably where the clawback occurs.
Also interesting new opinion from SCMP: Chinese bankers go communist – good for them
Also interesting new opinion from SCMP:
Interesting indeed considering how liberal of a publication SCMP tends to be.