In fact, as a developing country, despite the size of its economy, there are many places and in many aspects of life in which people are still poor - and poorly provided for by their government. Because there are industries plagued by overcapacity, there are many services that continue to suffer from a deplorable lack of capacity, such as healthcare, retirement care and education, because financial services still cater to institutions rather than middle-class individuals and households.

Jun Ma, Deutsche Bank's China economist, recently prepared charts showing the main under-provided services in China. In those areas the services accessible to the Chinese people are on average, from one-eighth to one-10th of other major economies in the world.

It would be difficult to tell, from the aggregate numbers of fixed-asset investment, how much is good and represents the new economic model (consumption-based growth) and how much is bad and represents the old economic model (the single-minded chase of manufacturing capacity and exports).

It would also be risky, at this moment, to use the data about the change in any single service (healthcare, for instance) to indicate the change in overall terms.

An easier way to measure the transition, if it ever happens, is to look at the comparison of the service sector's growth with that of the manufacturing sector - and the change in either sector's contribution to the total GDP.

From data available on the National Bureau of Statistics' website, one learns that, in the last 13 years at least, the service sectors had not managed to grow faster than the manufacturing sector until very recently. In 2012, the two sectors growth rates were on par. In 2013, for the first time, the service registered a growth of 8.3 percent year-on-year, while manufacturing was truly left behind, at 7.8 percent.