Wei says that China is not guarding against a market bubble, but the bubbling of the whole economy. He believes that among other differences between the China's economy today and Japan's of the 1980's, the yen appreciated to a much greater degree than the yuan has, owing to the fact that the Chinese government has been controlling it cautiously.

However, Wei warns that if anything significant does happen, it will potentially be be far much worse given the fragility of the Chinese banking system today compared with the strength of the Japanese one then.

"The bubble will pop sooner or later," says Xu Jian, a researcher at the People's Bank of China. "If you don't poke it, it pops on its own. And the bigger it is, the more losses will be incurred when it inevitably does. Thus, the earlier we can stop it, the better."