Ming Lu, Antai College of Economics and Management, Shanghai Jiao Tong University: In 2000, a French research center for developing economy study, the Center for Study and Research on International Development (CERDI) at the University of Clermont Auvergne, organized its third international conference on the Chinese economy, which is the first time I met with Professor Wing Thye Woo, the Editor-in-chief of Asian Economic Papers. The conference theme was “Is China a market economy?” Now, almost 20 years have passed, we are still asking the same question. This fact itself is quite interesting.
Is China a market economy, or is China at least moving toward being a market economy? Do we need to define a benchmark first to answer this question? Actually, we have a least two benchmarks for the discussion.
First, we compare the Chinese economy with the past. Miaojie Yu's paper clearly uses the past as a...