It is generally assumed that the notion of finiteness is not applicable to Chinese due to the lack of grammatical tense/person agreement. Meanwhile, syntactic evidence suggests that the finiteness distinction can be made from predicate types in Chinese, but exactly how finiteness is defined and why predicate types may determine finiteness in Chinese remain obscure. The paper argues that the paradox of finiteness distinction in Chinese can be solved if we assume a parameterized version of Bianchi’s (2003) definition of finiteness based on logophoric anchoring. Specifically, due to the lack of tense or person agreement, Chinese employs ‘world’ as the primary anchoring device, and since world-anchoring is correlated to the propositional attitude of the matrix predicate, this gives us an explanation why the finiteness of Chinese is sensitive to predicate types. We further argue that infinitive control complements are embedded jussive clauses in Chinese, and the internal world-anchoring is forced by a performative modal element that is present in both jussive and control clauses. By assuming that the embedded control clause is a centered proposition (a set of individual-world pairs) and the performative modal element anchors it to the internal speaker/addressee, the semantic mechanism allows us to unify various proposals regarding control and finiteness.