Azeem Azhar

Enjoy yourselves.

And everyone, please have a great weekend.

When you land in Beijing airport, you are greeted with an incredibly clean, well-functioning, well-ordered airport.

It's far above the quality of any of the US airports I've been to over the last few years.

I would put it roughly at the level of Heathrow Terminal 5, so certainly better than Terminal 3 or Terminal 2, better certainly than Frankfurt Airport, perhaps not as good as some of the

great Asian and Middle Eastern airports that have emerged since then, but that's absolutely a sense that you get as you land.

It didn't feel particularly police-y either.

I mean, you do get a sense of CCTV cameras as you do, for example, when you're landing in a London airport, and you obviously feel the police and security presence in many of these airports, particularly in the U.S.,

I was a bit surprised.

I really expected much more of that.

And there were lots of batteries of cameras you might find in public space in larger numbers than you would see in London.

So you arrive at this airport, it's clean, it's really, really well functioning.

One thing to notice that you notice really straight away is that there's essentially no obesity in China.

And in three days and seeing

hundreds of thousands of people, you get a sense that this is not an epidemic problem that they are dealing with.

The scale is absolutely huge.

I actually went to a conference as a sort of academic expert, and the conference center I was at ran to some 1.4 million square meters.

To give you a sense of what that scale is, that's 100 times the size of Union Square in San Francisco.

If you imagine Soho and Tribeca in New York, it's double that size.

And this is a convention center that was put up in just a few years, about seven or eight years ago.