One day, at a research conference in 2009, Chanos listened to an analyst tick off numbers about the scale of China's building boom. "He said they were building 5 billion square meters of new residential and office space -- 2.6 billion square meters in new office space alone. I said to him, 'You must have the decimal point in the wrong place.' He said no, the numbers are right. So do the math: That's almost 30 billion square feet of new construction. There are 1.3 billion people in China. [In terms of new office space alone] that amounts to about a five-by-five-foot cubicle for every man, woman, and child in the country. That's when it dawned on me that China was embarking on something unprecedented.''
Here's another point of view:
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-office-space-20101215,0,965694.story
I have no idea whether China is overbuilt, but does it change one's perspective when they are, then currently building what amounts to 'normal' office space for 1/8 of the country?