China imposed price controls on food in mid-November to limit inflation. But Chinese state media began warning the public on Wednesday that those controls might be ineffective, as a drought in northern China has damaged the winter wheat crop and frost has spoiled part of the vegetable harvest in the south.

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China’s $6 trillion economy used to be heavily dependent on exports for growth. Exports still account for about one-fifth of the economy, after excluding goods that are merely imported to China for final assembly and then re-exported. But China’s economy has grown powerfully for the last two years mainly on the strength of investment-led domestic demand. That demand, partly fed by low-interest lending by state-owned banks, is another factor in China’s inflation.

Cities and provinces across China have tried to cushion inflation’s effect on consumers by sharply raising minimum wages. Guangdong Province, the export heartland of light industry next to Hong Kong, announced two weeks ago that its cities were raising their minimum wages by an average of 18.6 percent, effective March 1.

That follows a similar increase that took effect in Guangdong around eight months ago. Many other provinces and cities have also sharply raised minimum wages recently.

The wage increases are also driven by a growing scarcity of factory workers. The number of Chinese in their 20s and early 30s, the traditional age bracket for factory labor, is slowly shrinking because of the introduction of the “one child system” a generation ago. And a rapidly expanding university system has produced waves of graduates with no interest in factory work.

Some companies have responded by moving factories deeper into China’s interior, said Stanley Lau, the deputy chairman of the Federation of Hong Kong Industries, which represents exporters employing 10 million mainland Chinese workers. But inland wages are starting to catch up with coastal pay rates, Mr. Lau said, while higher transportation costs frequently offset the wage savings from moving to the interior.

Coach, the American company that is one of the largest marketers of luxury handbags and other accessories, announced on Tuesday that it planned to reduce its reliance on China to less than half of its products, from more than 80 percent now. It will shift output to Vietnam and India, particularly for smaller, more labor-intensive leather goods.