The number of Chinese with personal assets exceeding 10 million yuan (US$1.49 million) is set to reach 383,000 by the end of this year, according to a white paper jointly issued by Forbes China and China Construction Bank in Beijing Tuesday.

The white paper noted that the total investment assets owned by those millionaires will rise to 10 billion yuan (US$1.5 billion) by the year end - a 16 percent increase compared to 8.6 billion yuan (US$1.2 billion) last year. The millionaires are mainly from trade and manufacturing sectors.

The real estate industry is becoming a key source of generating wealth, according to experts. Thanks to rising home prices in the past 10 years, real estate has contributed 11.6 percent of the millionaires. Nearly 60 percent of them chose to invest in the real estate market.

"The real estate industry has always been the cradle of rich people, but it is much more obvious since 2009," Tian Jingqi, general manger of a real estate company based in Beijing, told the Global Times Tuesday.

Guangdong Province, with 80,000 millionaires, accounts for the highest number of this wealthy category, followed by Zhejiang Province, Jiangsu Province, Beijing and Shanghai. These five places are home to 53 percent of the people on the list, who hold over 70 percent of the net assets of the community of millionaires.

Half the millionaires are graduates with a bachelor's degree. Dominant among the millionaires are the post-1960s and 1970s generation.

According to the report, with 22.6 percent of the millionaires having substantial offshore as-sets, it is clear investing overseas - Hong Kong being the first choice - is the trend in China.

Wang Xiaodong, a Beijing-based scholar, told the Global Times Tuesday that the report underestimates the number of millionaires.