Azeem Azhar

It was about 17 pounds, about $20 for that 30-minute journey.

Beijing South Station is chaos.

It's like so many people, so many people that you will get lost in there.

But again, to give you some sense, it's not much different to Grand Central, to be honest, or to London's Waterloo.

The trains themselves are super, super efficient, running on time, very, very quick, and really, really reasonably priced.

So that's just part of that infrastructure story.

But as you run through on the train journey, what you are seeing is all that concrete and steel that has been poured and laid down

over the last 30 years to support these bigger and bigger cities.

Beijing is, of course, about 20 million people.

Tianjin, where I went, was a much smaller city, but still 12 million, so really nearly double the size of London.

And you're seeing pristine, well-ordered roads and expressways.

And in fact, as I drove back from Tianjin to Beijing, the roads, again, were really, really impeccable

Busy, the occasional jam of traffic, but running really, really smoothly.

You know, thinking about other countries I visited, it certainly felt bigger in scale.

It felt more invested than anything I've seen in the US and things that I've seen in many parts of Europe, even some of the great construction projects like the Orison Sound crossing between Sweden and Denmark.

compared to some of the things that have gone on in India, there isn't quite the same backdrop of chaotic India when you are in these highways and on the train lines.

So I was really struck about with the degree to which

the infrastructure has been taken really, really seriously.

Of course, this is not a new story because we've read about it in the papers and many of you have no doubt visited China dozens of times in the last decade or so.

Some of you have probably lived there as well.