BEIJING (AP) — China’s government reported the scale of the yawning gulf between its rich and poor for the first time in 12 years on Friday and said it urgently needs to narrow the politically explosive gap.

Beijing failed to report the widely used Gini coefficient for income distribution for a decade as complaints about the widening income gap mounted during China’s fastest growth on record. That prompted suggestions the ruling Communist Party might be trying to downplay the gap between an elite who benefited from more than three decades of reform and the poor majority.