The thing is we don't have the best part of a billion people living in a desolate backward, almost jobless countryside that needed to be funnelled into economic

The thing is we don't have the best part of a billion people living in a desolate backward, almost jobless countryside that needed to be funnelled into economically productive occupations over the last 30 years, as China has. Most of our populations are already urbanised. The majority of the people who would live in this city already live in cities. We do have urban housing shortages and all sorts of demographic problems, I'm not saying a project like this is by necessity flawed, but the motivating dynamics for us are very different from what has been happening in China and SE Asia.