Society

Mention Guangzhou to the Chinese and they instinctively think of two things: food and money.

As the capital of the Guandong province, the city is the hub of the Cantonese cuisine and so, naturally, things like dim sum and char siu taste just a bit better than in other places. And as the factory workshop to the world, this sprawling city of 13 million—China's third-largest—is the engine for the Chinese economic miracle. Guangzhou is your place for cheap jeans and fridges.

Food and money come together in the city's countless gilded and chandeliered restaurants, where the upwardly mobile are eager to show their new riches by ordering expensive delicacies in excessive quantities. Here, Chinese diners clutching luxury handbags order Cantonese preparations of Californian abalone, Australian lobster and Thai prawns. New China indeed.

In a remote and mountainous part of China's southwest Yunnan province on a cool autumn morning, three of Asia's top movie stars are waiting for the action to begin.

Donnie Yen, Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tang Wei have traveled with the rest of the 200-plus crew to this isolated spot near the border with Myanmar, where they have been camped out since late August.

"Wu Xia," from director Peter Chan, is a $20 million martial-arts drama slated for release next summer. The story, which takes place during the end of the Qing Dynasty, is about a repentant killer living a simple life in a secluded village and whose past catches up with him.

China reported higher-than-expected inflation and new bank lending in October, figures that put in question the government's ability to reach key economic targets it had set to contain risks from its massive stimulus program.

As the end of 2010 approaches, the government's plans to limit inflation to near 3% and new bank lending to 7.5 trillion yuan (about $1.1 trillion) this year are both perilously closed to being violated. Those targets were adopted early this year as the government tried to shift course from last year's all-out drive for growth to combat the financial crisis.

Officials wanted to avoid a repeat of last year's historic surge of nearly 10 trillion yuan in new loans, which risked saddling banks with bad debts and inflating bubbles. But banks' eagerness to lend and upward pressures on prices have both turned out to be stronger than anticipated, which many analysts think will force the government to take tougher measures.

China has just achieved an impressive milestone: It has built the world's fastest supercomputer. The Tianhe-1A is more than 40% faster than the previous leader, at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. This is not an isolated event. Other, more mundane indicators of growing scientific capability in China have been emerging for years, such as the growing portion of articles in leading chemistry and physics journals that come from the country.

The supercomputer breakthrough is clearly a remarkable development that showcases the country's rising capabilities in research and development.