China's Communist Party theorists may try to blur the definitions, but there are two things that clearly differentiate capitalism from communism. The first is prices. If the prices of goods and services are set by supply and demand, you are probably living in a capitalist country. If, by contrast, they are set by bureaucrats, chances are you are living under communism.
The second telltale sign is ownership. If individuals are the predominant owners of assets, then capitalism reigns. If the government is the major owner, then the communists are in charge. The magic of the former system - and one encapsulated in the stock market - is that, if all goes well, many people can gain a slice of ownership.
China's economy is caught somewhere between the two. All but a handful of goods and services are now priced by the market. The dozen-or-so goods whose prices remain controlled are basic items - grains, like rice and wheat; utilities, like gas and water; and money (since interest rates are fixed by the central bank).
Measuring the publicly and privately owned shares of China's economy is extremely tricky. Getting data from the companies themselves is difficult, and deciding whether each is private or public is often a huge challenge, given the mixed ownership structure that has developed.
Some brave economists have had a go. In 2000, the International Finance Corporation, the private equity arm of the World Bank, estimated that the private economy accounted for 33 per cent of industrial output - 62 per cent if agriculture and collective enterprises were included. More recently, Guy Liu Shaojia, an academic at Brunel University in Britain, found that 54 per cent of industrial output is accounted for by state-controlled firms.
China's private sector has grown in two ways. The first is organic: firms like Taitai Pharmaceuticals in Shenzhen were established by entrepreneurs. The second method is privatisation of state-owned enterprises (SOEs). Most of China's small and medium-sized SOEs have been sold, mostly to their own employees.