Shanghai’s commercial property sector is in the middle of a massive boom, in spite of the global economic slowdown and the opening at the weekend of more space in the shape of China’s tallest building, the 101-storey Shanghai World Financial Centre built by Minoru Mori, the Japanese property tycoon.

The office property boom is so well entrenched it could turn out to be on a par with London during the “Big Bang” years of the 1980s, when financial liberalisation helped double the size of the financial district in a decade, says Michael Thompson, Asia Pacific chief executive of Cushman & Wakefield, the real estate firm.