Should China still be considered a developing country? The hotly debated issue has also become a topic at the upcoming UN summit on the Millennium Development Goals.

As China has achieved rapid economic growth in the past three decades, voice challenging China's status as a developing country from some Western countries has become increasingly louder.

Undeniably, some raise the question for lack of understanding about China as they only look at its amazing economic success instead of the huge gap between the country and the developed nations.

However, some make a fuss over the massive total GDP of the world's most populous country with ulterior political and economic motives.

As claimed by Bernard Baumohl, executive director of the Economic Outlook Group, "China can no longer be called an emerging economy...It has to come to terms with a greater international responsibility."

Hong Pingfan, chief for global economic monitoring center of the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs, said that the "China threat" theory is, in fact, fabricated with the aim to slow down and check China's development.

He told Xinhua in a recent interview that the real intention of those trying to rate China as a developed country is to force China to pay more in the global economic game, thus benefiting their own countries.

Chinese analysts said that those who question China's national identity, meant in fact to deprive China of the privileges in such fields as international trade and environment.

Despite the fact that China has overtaken Japan as the No. 2 economy in the world, the country still lags far behind in per capita GDP and is still a developing country.

Hong said that the gap in terms of per capita income between China and developed nations remains considerable.

China's per capita GDP of less than 4,000 U.S. dollars a year is still far less than the world average level of 9,000 dollars, he said.

Moreover, the country's social security, health service and public education still lag far behind the developed countries, he said.

Though already the world's biggest exporter, China has no world-class brand, and its exports are processing-based and lacks innovation, Hong added.

"The total GDP is only one of the economic indicators of a country's economic strength. There are still many other metrics," said Sergei Luzyanin, deputy director of the Institute of Far Eastern Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

"Taking the country's huge population into account and look at its GDP on a per capita basis, China is far behind the developed countries, including the United States and Japan, in global rankings," he said.

Nigel Chalk, senior advisor of the IMF's Asia and Pacific Department, said that China fundamentally is a developing economy, and many of its vast rural areas are still poor.

"About half of the Chinese population still live in the rural areas that actually are poor. When you look at the objective indicators like the gross domestic product (GDP) per capita, it is still very low, like one tenth of that in my country Britain and is only a fraction of that in the United States," Chalk said.

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