The late leader of Chinese reform Deng Xiaoping once said reform was also a revolution. People do see a revolutionary moment every time a reform is about to take a new turn.

In the past few weeks, when the economy was running at its lowest growth rate in two years - partly engineered by the central government to cut overcapacity and wasteful investment projects - Chinese business media reported on a stream of provincial leaders scheduling meetings with officials of the Ministry of Finance, appealing for leniency and special fiscal terms for their ambitious ongoing development plans.

Those local leaders came from places such as Guangdong, the province with the highest GDP figure, Henan, the province with the nation's largest rural population waiting for off-farm jobs, and Guizhou, the underdeveloped mountainous province with many ethnic groups.

No doubt, every province is special. (And which one isn't?) Soon enough, as one can imagine, all provinces - joined by all the financial corporations that have partnered them in projects - will form a united front to lobby the central government to relent on efforts at fiscal tightening, so that they can continue sleeping comfortably on their old development model, characteristic of big projects, big money, big statistical numbers - but not much real benefit for society - and certainly no sustainability.

That was their old way of running local economies. It was, much to the regret of most economists, given a shot in the arm with the world's largest financial stimulus package during the early days of the last financial crisis. It has remained the only way that many local governments know about how to run the economy.

But just one day after the National Bureau of Statistics reported on Monday about GDP's 7.6 percent growth in the first half of the year (7.5 percent being the annual target), the central government wasted no time in sending out its key message. Another stimulus of the 2008-09 type? No way.

At a meeting on Tuesday, Premier Li Keqiang said China cannot afford to alter its policy orientation just because of temporary ups and downs in some indexes, although it has to make preparations to prevent the economy moving outside a "reasonable range" in large fluctuations.

A few well-known economists at the meeting shared the premier's view that there is no need for a fresh round of major stimulus.

Having said this, however, one may bear in mind that revolution is not just fighting between two belligerent camps. In the end, there has to be a solution, one that can make the old point of contention obsolete.

After all, a slowdown is brought about not just for the sake of a slowdown, but for local governments to learn new, more innovative ways of running the economy - of how to fill the new property they built with new businesses and new jobs.

In the second half of the year, barring succumbing to the lobby for an all-round bailout, Beijing still can do many things to promote the kind of results it wants. Small incentives can be used to give impetus to a select number of industries, including the service industries that generate jobs and market activity much more effectively than manufacturing and construction.

If, as the tendency shows, the index of the service industry (its contribution to GDP in percentage terms, say) is used to measure a mayor's or a provincial governor's job performance, a lot of things would begin to change.

Local governments would begin to learn how to work together with small companies and small-shop-owners to generate economic prosperity and increase their revenue, rather than depending almost parasitically on land auctions and large building projects for the so-called development.

The author is editor-at-large of China Daily.

(China Daily USA 07/17/2013 page14)