China consistently achieves its growth targets—so predictable you could set your watch by it. Yet the real story lies elsewhere. The path to hitting those numbers keeps catching markets off guard.

What makes this interesting? Growth targets can be met through wildly different mechanisms. Policy stimulus, industrial restructuring, export surges, domestic consumption boosts—the toolkit is vast. Markets obsess over the headline number and miss the structural shifts happening underneath.

This unpredictability in execution methods matters for asset allocation. When growth comes from unexpected sources, capital flows shift. Commodity demand surges. Tech spending changes. Credit cycles twist in surprising directions.

The takeaway: don't just watch whether the target gets hit. Watch how it gets hit. The methods reveal where real money is moving next.