China Airborne

by James Fallows

  Copyright © 2012 by James Fallows

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Fallows, James M.

  China airborne / James Fallows.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-90740-0

  1. Aeronautics—China 2. Aeronautics, Commercial—China. 3. Aerospace industries—China. 4. China—Economic conditions—2000– I. Title.

  TL527.C5F35 2012 387.70951—dc23 2011046805

  www.pantheonbooks.com

  Jacket image from a painting by Yu Zhenli, May 1976. (altered detail).

  Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

  v3.1

  For Lincoln Caplan and Eric Redman

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  1. This Is Going to Be Big

  2. Getting Off the Ground

  3. The Men from Boeing

  4. The Chinese Master Plan

  5. An Airport in the Wilderness

  6. An American Dream, Turned Chinese

  7. China’s Own Boeing

  8. The Environmental Consequences of Aviation

  9. The Tensions Inside China

  10. The Chinese Model, Airborne

  Notes

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Acknowledgments

  This book is dedicated with gratitude to Lincoln Caplan and Eric Redman, friends and advisers through most of my life, who during the evolution of this book have once again been generous and perceptive sources of the right mixture of criticism, support, humor, and inspiration. I am fortunate to have them as friends and to know I can rely on them, as I have done very often over the years.

  The Atlantic has been my professional home since the late 1970s; through that time I have grown only more appreciative of its journalistic values and its internal culture. David Bradley and Justin Smith have made one of America’s oldest literary institutions into a viable modern business. James Bennet and Scott Stossel have guided it (and me) editorially, and were generous in letting me take time to work on this book during an already short-staffed period for the magazine. Before them I worked closely with a sequence of wonderful Atlantic editors: Robert Manning, William Whitworth, Michael Kelly, and Cullen Murphy. In recent years I have worked directly with Corby Kummer, Sue Parilla, Marge duMond, and Janice Cane on most of my articles for the magazine, including during my years in China, and with Bob Cohn and John Gould for items on the Atlantic’s web site. As with previous books, I really should list every name on the magazine’s masthead, but I will mention those I worked with most often during the time I was in China: Nicole Allan, Marc Ambinder, Lindsey Bahr, Jennifer Barnett, Ashley Bolding, Ben Bradley, Lucy Byrd, Ben Carlson, Steve Clemons, Cotton Codinha, Abby Cutler, Stacey Pavesi-Debre, Betsy Ebersole, Geoffrey Gagnon, James Gibney, Jeffrey Goldberg, Chris Good, Bruce Gottlieb, John Gould, Joshua Green, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, Alisha Hathawa, Carl Holscher, Shana Keefe, Elizabeth Keffer, Aaron Kenner, Jay Lauf, Clair Lorell, Alexis Madrigal, Megan McGuinn, Justin Miller, Chris Orr, Don Peck, Lyndsay Polloway, Michael Proffitt, Natalie Raabe, Yvonne Rolzhausen, Emmy Scandling, Suzanne Smalley, Ellie Smith, Maria Streshinksy, John Fox Sullivan, Derek Thompson, Jason Treat, and Robert Vare.

  Since its founding in 2008, the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney has been an additional, welcome professional home. I thank Geoffrey Garrett for building and leading the Centre and making me a part of it; his colleagues Sean Gallagher, Nina Fudala, Craig Purcell, Will Turner, Amber D’Souza, and others; and Joe Skrzynski for his hospitality in Sydney. My other long-term unofficial journalistic home has been National Public Radio, and in particular I thank Guy Raz, Phil Harrell, Matthew Martinez, Rick Holter, Daniel Shukhin, and others with whom I have enjoyed working on the Weekend All Things Considered program.

  Wendy Weil, my literary agent for more than thirty years, represented me with skill, toughness, understanding, and tact on this project as she has on seven previous ones. At Pantheon, my publisher for most of the past twenty years, I am grateful for the insight and guidance of my editor, Dan Frank, who originally had the idea for this book and saw it through several stages of evolution, and for the patience, flexibility, and help of Jill Verrillo, Altie Karper, and Josie Kals.

  I have been fascinated by and involved with Cirrus aircraft since the late 1990s, when I first wrote about the start-up Cirrus Design company for The New York Times Magazine. Soon thereafter I bought a Cirrus SR20 and flew it frequently around America and Canada, before selling it when I moved to China in 2006. This book describes the important roles played in China by first Peter Claeys and then Paul Fiduccia of Cirrus. I am grateful to both of them for their time and trust. Also I thank Ian Bentley, Gary Black, Scott Jiang, and Gary Poelma, now of Cirrus. Plus, in other roles in aviation, Alan Klapmeier, Kate Dougherty, Bruce Holmes, and Lane Wallace; and Michael Klein, Boni Caldeira, and Steve Musgrove of Open Air, with whose guidance I have bought and happily flown a used Cirrus SR22. For this book I should also acknowledge my original flight instructors, Ken Michaelson and Chris Baker. Everyone who follows aviation has learned from the insights of Richard Aboulafia, of the Teal Group. I am grateful for all the time he spent helping me clarify the arguments in this book.

  In and around China, for friendship, advice, and help of different sorts between 2006 and 2012, I would like to thank: Andy Andreasen, Fr. Ron Anton, Phil Baker, Andrew Batson, Bing and Daniel Bell, Dominic Barton, Richard Burger, Liam Casey, Liz Rawlings and Steve Chalupsky, Francis Chao, Dovar Chen, Patrick Chovanec, Ella Chou, Chen Xin, Duncan Clark, Melanie and Eliot Cutler, Simon Elegant, Pamela Leonard and John Flower, Rebecca Frankel and Mike, Julio Friedmann, Gao Yuanyang, Jeremy Goldkorn, Jim Gradoville, Paola Sada and Jorge Guajardo, York-chi and Stephen Harder, Guo Liang, Hu Shuli, Andrew Houghton, Andrew Hutson, Ann and Ken Jarrett, Jeremiah Jenne, Isaac Kardon, Kent Kedl, Elizabeth Knup, Kaiser Kuo, Showkee Lee and her family, Kai-fu Lee, Yumin Liang, Mei Fong and Andrew Lih, Rebecca and Kenny Lin, Jeanee and Brian Linden, Barbara and Robert Liotta, River Lu, Damien Ma, Jim McGregor, Kirk McDonald, Adam Minter, Russell Leigh Moses, John Northen, Evan Osnos, Herve Pauze and Lisa Robins, Minxin Pei, Michael Pettis, Fr. Roberto Ribeiro, Sidney Rittenberg, Robin Bordie and Andy Rothman, Bob Schapiro, Rita O’Connor and Ted Schell, Baifang and Orville Schell, Shi Hongshen, Sam Popkin and Susan Shirk, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Andrew Moravcsik, Sherry Smith and Marcus Corley, Nina Ni and Sun Tze, Andy Switky, Shane Tedjarati, Joe Tymczyszyn, Michele Travierso, Ping Wang, Sean Wang, Louis Woo, Candice and Jarrett Wrisley, Jenny and Bill Wright, Kevin Wu, Michael Zakkour, and Dan Guttman and ZeeZee Zhong.

  During a ten-week period early in 2010, I turned my part of the Atlantic’s Web site over to teams of guest bloggers while I was finishing a draft of this book. For their excellent work I am grateful to them all. For the record, the full list, including a number of people already mentioned, is: David Allen, Phil Baker, Mark Bernstein, Eric Bonabeau, Keith Blount, Don Brown, Liam Casey, Ella Chou, Parker Donham, Kate Dougherty, Xujun Eberlein, Lizzy Bennett Fallows, Deborah Fallows, Eamonn Fingleton, Julian Fisher, Julio Friedmann, Piero Garau, Brian Glucroft, Edward Goldstick, Sriram Gollapalli, Paola and Jorge Guajardo, Glenna Hall, Shelley Hayduk, Bruce Holmes, Jeremiah Jenne, Alan Klapmeier, Christina Larson, Damien Ma, Adam Minter, Grace Peng, Lucia Pierce, Guy Raz, Sam Roggeveen, David Ryan, Sanjay Saigal,
Kate Sedgwick, Chuck Spinney, Andrew Sprung, John Tierney, Kentaro Toyama, Michele Travierso, and Lane Wallace.

  As for technology: This book was written using Literature & Latte’s wonderful Scrivener writing software. I relied on the different and complementary strengths of the programs DEVON-think Pro, Zoot, PersonalBrain, and TinderBox for storing, organizing, and retrieving research data.

  Our extended family—our son Tom and his wife, Lizzy, our son Tad and his, wife, Annie, and their new son, Jack—was of course a source of joy and support to my wife and me during the years in which I reported and then wrote this book. My wife, Deborah Fallows, is the key to everything I have done.

  Washington, D.C.

  January 2012

  Introduction

  The flight to Zhuhai

  In the fall of 2006, not long after I arrived in China, I was the copilot on a small-airplane journey from Changsha, the capital of Hunan province near the center of the country, to Zhuhai, a tropical settlement on the far southern coast just west of Hong Kong.

  The plane was a sleek-looking, four-seat, propeller-driven model called the Cirrus SR22, manufactured by a then wildly successful start-up company in Duluth, Minnesota, called Cirrus Design. Through the previous five years, the SR22 had been a worldwide commercial and technological phenomenon, displacing familiar names like Cessna and Piper to become the best-selling small airplane of its type anywhere. Part of its appeal was its built-in “ballistic parachute,” a unique safety device capable of lowering the entire airplane safely to the ground in case of disaster. The first successful “save” by this system in a Cirrus occurred in the fall of 2002, when a pilot took off from a small airport near Dallas in a Cirrus that had just been in for maintenance. A few minutes after takeoff, an aileron flopped loosely from one of the wings; investigators later determined that it had not been correctly reattached after maintenance. This made the plane impossible to control and in other circumstances would probably have led to a fatal crash. Instead the pilot pulled the handle to deploy the parachute, came down near a golf-course fairway, and walked away unharmed. The plane itself was repaired and later flown around the country by Cirrus as a promotional device for its safety systems.

  On the tarmac in Changsha, on a Sunday evening as darkness fell, I sat in the Cirrus’s right-hand front seat, traditionally the place for the copilot—or the flight instructor, during training flights. In the left-hand seat, usually the place for the pilot-in-command, sat Peter Claeys, a Belgian citizen and linguistic whiz whose job, from his sales base in Shanghai, was to persuade newly flush Chinese business tycoons that they should spend half a million U.S. dollars or more to buy a Cirrus plane of their own—even though there was as yet virtually no place in China where they would be allowed to fly it. I was there as a friend of Claeys’s and because I was practically the only other person within a thousand miles who had experience as a pilot of the Cirrus. In one of the backseats was Walter Wang, a Chinese business journalist who, even more than Claeys and me, was happily innocent of the risks we were about to take.

  We were headed to Zhuhai because every two years, in November, the vast military-scale runway and ramp areas of Zhuhai’s Sanzao Airport become crammed with aircraft large and small that have flown in from around the world for the Zhuhai International Air Show, an Asian equivalent of the Paris Air Show. Zhuhai’s main runway, commissioned by grand-thinking local officials without the blessing of the central government in Beijing, is more than 13,000 feet long—longer than any at Heathrow or LAX. The rest of the facilities are on a similar scale, and during most of the year sit practically vacant. As long-term punishment by the Beijing authorities for the local government’s ambitious overreach, the airport has been (as a local manager told me ruefully on a visit in 2011) “kept out of the aviation economy” that has brought booms to the surrounding airports in Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou.

  But briefly every two years, every bit of its space is called into play. So many planes are present there’s barely room to maneuver. Because nearly all of the twenty-first century’s growth in the world’s aviation market has been and is expected to be in Asia, with most of that in China, Zhuhai has become more and more important as the place for aerospace merchants and customers to meet. Boeing has booths there, and so does Airbus, and so do Russian and Brazilian and Israeli suppliers—the Russians and Brazilians and others with squads of “booth babes”—plus American and European architecture firms hoping to design the environmentally friendly new Chinese airports of the future, plus every military contractor from every part of the globe trying to sell fighters or attack helicopters to governments with extra cash. The plane we sat in was the only demonstration model of the Cirrus then available in China, and Claeys was the company’s only salesman and company pilot anywhere nearby. If he and the plane didn’t get there by that Sunday evening, he would be embarrassingly absent for the next day’s demo flights, sales talks, and other events he had been lining up for months.

  So Claeys was making the trip because he had to, and Walter Wang because he wanted a ride to Zhuhai to cover the show. I was there to help as Claeys’s copilot. At the time I imagined that this would be the first of many small-plane trips I would be making in China.

  After all, China would seem to be a country made for travel by air. Like Australia, like Brazil, like Russia or Canada or most of the United States away from the urban Northeast, it is characterized by vast distances; widely separated population centers; mountains and gorges and other barriers separating the cities and making land travel slow and difficult—plus dramatic, interesting scenery to view from above. China’s commercial-airline business, starting from a very limited base, was already booming, with nearly twice as many people flying on airlines in 2006 as five years earlier, and twice as many again by 2011.

  With the surge of private wealth and the rise of industrial centers at far-flung points across the country, “general aviation” would seem a natural candidate for development. This category includes every sort of non-airline activity, from corporate jets for China’s scores of new billionaires and thousands of rising millionaires to crop-dusting activities in its farmlands to search-and-rescue operations after disasters or last-minute organ-transplant flights to purely recreational flight. You could take China’s relatively limited numbers of airplanes, airports, and overall aviation activities as a sign of backwardness—or, as was the case in so many other aspects of modern China, as an indication of a gap that could be quickly closed with a huge spurt of construction, investment, and capital outlay.

  The many countries of China

  Now a word about the territory we would see from above. The main surprise of living in China, as opposed to reading or hearing about it, is how much it is a loose assemblage of organizations and aspects and subcultures, an infinity of self-enclosed activities, rather than a “country” in the normal sense. The plainest fact about modern China for most people on the scene often seems the hardest to grasp from afar. That is simply how varied, diverse, contradictory, and quickly changing conditions within the country are. Any large country is diverse and contradictory, but China’s variations are of a scale demanding special note.

  What is true in one province is false in the next. What was the exception last week is the rule today. A policy that is applied strictly in Beijing may be ignored or completely unknown in Kunming or Changsha. Millions of Chinese people are now very rich, and hundreds of millions are still very poor. Their country is a success and a failure, an opportunity and a threat, an inspiring model to the world and a nightmarish cautionary example. It is tightly controlled and it is out of control; it is futuristic and it is backward; its system is both robust and shaky. Its leaders are skillful and clumsy, supple and stubborn, visionary and foolishly shortsighted.

  Of course there are exceptional moments when the disparate elements of China seem to function as a coherent whole. Over a six-month period in 2008, the entire country seemed to be absorbed by a succession of dramatic politi
cal and natural events. First, the pre-Olympic torch relay began its ceremonial progression from Mount Olympus in Greece to Beijing and was the cause of nationwide celebration. (“Happiness Abounds as Country Cheers,” read a banner headline in the China Daily.) The mood shifted abruptly when the relay was disrupted by Tibetan-rights protestors across Europe, to the widespread astonishment, horror, and, soon, fury of people in mainland China—where the accepted version of Tibetan history is that the territory has always been part of the Chinese nation, and that the people of Tibet should be grateful for Mao’s having rescued them from the feudal tyranny of the lamas. Then, on May 12, 2008, everything else vanished from the Chinese media when a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan province and at least eighty thousand mostly poor people were killed. Three months after that, the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games seemed to command attention in every part of the country and again marked a shift of national mood.

  During periods like these, it can seem sensible to talk about a single cohesive-minded “China.” And when acting on the international stage, or when imposing some internal political rules, the central government can operate as a coordinated entity. But most of the time, visitors—and Chinese people too—see vividly and exclusively the little patch of “China” that is in front of them, with only a guess as to how representative it might be of happenings anywhere else. You can develop a feel for a city, a company, a party boss, an opportunity, a problem—and then see its opposite as soon as you go to another town.

  Such observations may sound banal—China, land of contrasts!—but I have come to think that really absorbing them is one of the greatest challenges for the outside world in reckoning with China and its rise. A constant awareness of the variety and contradictions within China does not mean suspending critical judgments or failing to observe trends that prevail in most of the country most of the time. For instance, it really is true that for most Chinese families, life is both richer and freer than it was in the 1980s, and is immeasurably better on both counts than it was in the 1960s. It is also true that in most of the country, air and water pollution are so dire as to constitute not simply a major threat to public health but also a serious impediment to China’s continued prospects for economic growth. So some overall statements about “China” and “the Chinese” are fair. But because of the country’s scale, because of the linguistic and cultural barriers that can make it seem inaccessible, and because of the Chinese government’s efforts to project the image of a seamlessly unified nation, outsiders are tempted to overlook the rifts, variation, and chaos, and talk about Chinese activities as if they were one coordinated whole. Therefore it is worth building in reminders of how many varied and often conflicting Chinas there really are.