Every quarter, every month, every week, there are journalistic pieces around the world and in China saying the Chinese economy may be in or on the verge of some big trouble. Other pieces say not quite or not yet.

But now things are already different from the wobbly start of the year. The government released its report about the economy's performance in the third quarter recently, and one can now say China had more encouraging performance in 2016 than in 2015.

Better, but not in terms of GDP growth. The country's annualized GDP growth was 6.9 percent in 2015, and will probably be around 6.5 percent this year, based on the growth data of the first three quarters (6.7 percent on average).

Of course, people can still say there are many difficulties - most noticeably that the country can never again dash forward at a speed of around 10 percent. Slower growth than the first decade of the 2000s is a given, not a surprise, and part of what officials call the "new normal".

Nonetheless, the economy has shown, much more clearly than last year, what it can do to sustain a minimum level of stability in the process of its unprecedented transition. It shows to the world how it can keep growing when it is no longer driven by labor-intensive manufacturing and massive exports, by indiscriminate spending and by the ever-increasing use of traditional energy and the related discharge of pollution.

In other words, what people can see in China in 2016 is its actual development scenario, which is far more important than any strategy on paper or any policy laid out in a government news release.

Now let's look at the key components of this scenario:

Growth driver one: Real estate-related development led mostly by coastal cities, especially the so-called city groups of the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, and the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei belt. Despite the complaint about the skyrocketing prices in Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen as deterrents to young professionals and a threat to new business ventures, their satellite towns and nearby small cities are increasingly benefiting from the regional resources and can become the large cities' not-so-expensive service centers.

Cheaper housing projects and better public facilities can help those small cities get the human resources they need and develop local productivity in due course.

According a State Council document issued recently, China will help up to 13 million formerly rural people settle down in the cities each year from 2016 to 2020, to eke out urban labor and generate additional consumer demand.

So even though there are heavy restrictions in some large cities, people who are chasing better opportunities and welfare terms will still swarm to the eastern coast. The demographic trend will continue despite the changing residential housing market terms of individual cities.

Growth driver two: Government investment will be more concentrated in the hands of central authorities. The most likely projects to receive capital injections from central government are those in energy development and high-speed railways in the still underdeveloped hinterlands and western frontier regions.

Growth driver three: Cities will try to develop themselves. As large cities tend to be more heavily indebted from their past development attempts and face more stern regulatory terms for refinancing, the only viable option for them, according to central government, is to engage with private investors through mixed ownership schemes. Whether any smaller ones can act more quickly is still to be seen.

Growth driver four: Personal investment and credit. People tend to invest and borrow a lot more in large cities, in their housing units, in the securities market and in their own or their friends' business ventures. Soon enough, China will become the largest personal financial market in the world, with a variety of novel instruments. But how to ensure the healthy development of this market is going to be a new challenge for which the nation is not yet prepared.

The author is an editor-at-large of China Daily. Contact the writer at edzhang@

chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 10/21/2016 page13)