The actual reality of how China works is much more complicated than this "select from a dropdown menu" system you are implying.

For one thing it's made up of fairly autonomous provinces that all compete between each others, for another the actual strategy has been heavily relying on extensive local experimentation to find growth models that can be applied nationally.

Nah he's correct, local government compete on implementation details, not overall strategy that is monopolize by the central government. Which has the same pitfalls (-see zero-covid or the debt crisis owing to gdp targets)