The nation's genetic engineers routinely synthesize medicines and its top surgeons perform the most challenging of procedures.
Nuclear plants supply electricity to millions of customers across southern and eastern China.
Chinese elites flock to the Internet and to cellular phone networks. Chinese satellites orbit the Earth, and the technology that launched them allows Beijing to credibly threaten cities as far away as Los Angeles with the nuclear weapons that China first developed more than 30 years ago. It is common in China's largest cities, for example, to see construction workers using shovels to mix concrete in small piles on the ground, or road workers leveling huge swathes of land with only hand tools. In the countryside, many of China's 900 million rural dwellers have never heard of the Internet. You can already see it developing along the coast, and even in the countryside near the larger cities.