Is there a finite vs. nonfinite distinction in Chinese?

Some special devices are designed to test the existence of the finiteness of a Chinese clause, though Chinese evidently fails to meet the general conditions on finiteness. These tests include the occurrence of aspectual markers and modals as AUX in finite but not in nonfinite clauses, the obligatory nullness of the subject of the nonfinite clause (Huang 1988 [1982], 1984, 1987, 1989), the cooccurrence constraint, and the licensing of negative polarity items (Y.-H. A. Li 1985, 1990), as well as C.-C. Tang's (1990) criteria, which are not much discussed in the literature. In this paper we make a careful study of all these criteria specially devised for Chinese and find that none of them can make a valid distinction between finiteness and nonfiniteness. Since, as far as we know, there is no independent evidence to support such a distinction, we conclude that it in fact does not exist in Chinese.