BBC World: Extract from “Click China”

With its towering skyscrapers and wide boulevards, Shanghai is a twenty first century city, but it would be easy to get the wrong impression. To get a feeling for the real China, you have to walk down one of the side streets, and if you do that you start to get a feeling for some of the challenges faced by this vast country as it joins the rest of us in the age of the Internet and the worldwide web.

That's because for the vast majority of Chinese, who live in remote rural areas, a PC costs the equivalent of a year's salary. If there is a phone line that connects their village to the world, in some cases it will be so outdated as to be made of iron.

Bob Hayward: "There is a danger of having too many false expectations about China. Just as we saw the dotcom bubble bursting, you can do the same thing with a country as well and get overexcited about the expectations. The reality is that doing business in China is hard, it takes patience, you have to be careful about what you're doing, some of the opportunities may not be as big as people think. You have to be realistic and pragmatic about China."

It is a stark warning to foreign IT businesses that see the mirage of a massive, billion strong market.