OPINION: Stop dreaming, start delivering

A friend's just got back from China. Apart from reporting on the quite disgusting things to be found on the menu of your average rural restaurant - sweet and sour slugs and the like - he can't stop talking about the massive changes going on there. We worry about high-rise tower blocks and Shanghai has more than 2,000 35-storey buildings with over 2,000 more planned. We get in a tiz over 700,000 extra people being in London by 2015, and half a dozen cities in China are each confidently planning for millions more. We agonise about widening a road and in China they're flattening the Himalayas.