On arrival in the United States, Feng had been dazzled by its technological modernity. He traveled around the country, working in machine shops and shipyards to learn skills he could eventually take back to China.6 As an article in Air & Space magazine put it, “Feng became well known for developing alternate versions of the water pump, the generator, the telephone, and the wireless telegraph, some of which were used by San Francisco’s Chinese businessmen.” After the Wright brothers’ flight, as part of the general romance of flight that swept the world, Feng Ru became obsessed with aviation, produced Chinese translations of reports on the Wright brothers and their competitors, and decided to create an airplane of his own.
He worked in secret, in a tiny room that he grandly called the Guangdong Aircraft Factory; he ordered parts from a variety of manufacturers so that no one supplier would be wise to his plans. By 1909, he had designed and built a biplane that, on September 21, he successfully kept aloft for more than twenty minutes in the hills outside Oakland. For a while his work caused an international sensation, which included coverage in The New York Times and a congratulatory message from Sun Yat-sen. He returned to China but was killed, at age twenty-nine, in a crash in 1912 while performing before a crowd of a thousand in Guangzhou. Sun Yat-sen decreed that Feng’s grave should carry the words “Chinese Aviation Pioneer.”
During the “anti-Japanese war,” which is the way Chinese histories refer to the entire period from 1937 to 1945, Chinese forces had essentially no air power of their own. Japanese bombers struck Chinese cities at will during a series of invasions into Manchuria in the north and then Shanghai and eventually Hong Kong in the south. Once the United States entered the war, its main aerial involvement within China was via convoys that went over the hump of the Himalayas, from India and Burma, to deliver armaments and supplies to Chinese forces in Kunming and Chongqing (then referred to as Chungking) and to fight Japanese forces there. More than sixty years after the war’s end, in the far southern reaches of Yunnan province that border Burma and India, my wife and I saw the remnants of the radio stations that had guided U.S. aviators over the Hump. This was in a small town near Dali named Xizhou, which happened also to be where the teachers of Yale’s China program had fled when Japanese troops overran Chongqing.
Mao’s China takes to the skies, barely
When the civil war was over and the communists were in charge, China had only the most rudimentary aviation industry or establishment. Some two hundred airplanes total were left after more than a decade of war—fewer than one day’s production for the United States during its World War II peak. This fleet was replenished briefly, with Soviet help, to challenge the American forces during the Korean War. But the industry that emerged from the era of Soviet cooperation, through the 1950s until the split between Mao and Khrushchev in the early 1960s, was autarkic and out of date.
For the country as a whole, the most destructive phase of Mao’s economic mismanagement was of course the Great Leap Forward of the mid- and late 1950s. Tens of millions of people starved to death in the countryside—more than the number of Soviet soldiers and civilians who perished during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, more than the number of European Jews slaughtered during the Holocaust—as mass levees of manpower took workers from tending the farms to working in fanciful village-level steel mills. When it came to genuine factories, those still producing the nation’s trucks and tractors and locomotives and few airplanes, Mao developed a strategy known as sanxian (), or “third line,” as in “third line of defense.” Factories were moved away from the coastline and distributed through interior provinces, often nestled into remote valleys in the middle of mountain ranges. Thus an attacking enemy—presumably the United States, but after the Sino-Soviet breakup the Soviet Union became another perceived threat—would face the daunting prospect of fighting a land war through the center of China if it contemplated destroying these facilities. Even if attacking by air, it would have to send its bombers on long, difficult missions to reach the factories, rather than attacking them where they had been, in obvious concentrations near the coast at Guangzhou in the south, Tianjin in the north, or Shanghai in between. One of the predictable surprises of traveling though today’s Chinese countryside is coming across steel mills, engine works, and other derelict-looking heavy industrial sites far from major cities—not that the major cities are short on them. The nationwide dispersal of industries, while intended as a national security measure and as a way of bringing opportunity to the hinterland, also meant that areas of rural China you might expect to be “pristine” now can have as heavy a pall of industrial smoke as the biggest cities do.
As applied to aviation, the dispersal plan led to small factories all over the country, plus a major concentration of airplane factories and related plants outside the famous central city of Xi’an. In Chinese history, the city was known as Chang’an—, “long peace”—and was a capital through ten dynasties in Chinese antiquity. Its modern name, Xi’an, or , means “western peace.” In modern history, Xi’an is known for the thousands of terra-cotta warriors on its outskirts. But among its distinctions, from the sanxian perspective, is that among China’s major cities it was the one farthest from any land border, the counterpart to a site in Kansas or Nebraska in the United States, and thus theoretically safest from aerial attack. (And of course during the Cold War the United States based much of its nuclear missile and bomber fleets in the Great Plains, for similar reasons.) Today, some quarter million people, more than the total worldwide payroll of Boeing and Airbus combined, work in Xi’an’s aviation industries, supervised by a Chinese engineer in his fifties who has a bust of George Washington in his office.
The Chinese industrial sector as a whole was inefficient and poorly designed, by world standards, during the Mao era, and the same was true of its aerospace factories. “A major structural weakness and a legacy of the Maoist past is the widespread duplication and balkanization of industrial and research facilities,” Tai Ming Cheung, of the University of California, San Diego, said at a U.S. government hearing on “China’s Emergent Military Aerospace and Commercial Aviation Capabilities” in 2010.7 He pointed out that technically backward, underfunded Mao-era China had well over a hundred separate airplane-related factories or research centers all across the country. Far from pooling their limited resources or coordinating their efforts, they were active rivals for funding and prominence, meaning that together they made even less progress than they might otherwise have done.
Until the late 1970s, the operations of China’s domestic airlines were similarly state-controlled and sheltered from market forces. The few airlines in existence sent the few airplanes they had to a few cities along a limited number of state-mandated routes. The few passengers were not allowed to buy tickets unless they had authorization from their danwei, the Party-led business or work unit that controlled most aspects of their lives. During the most totalitarian periods under Mao, authorization from the danwei was needed before members could marry, have children, consider different jobs, or travel inside or (rarely) outside the country. The whole air-travel network operated more or less the way military air travel does in the United States, without the efficiency or the scale. Thus its transformation into a system that had to compete with, or at least coexist alongside, established international carriers, while expanding domestically on pace with the new era’s growth, was as difficult as for any other Chinese industry—if not more so.
How other countries did it
Economists use the term “path dependence” to convey the simple idea that choices you made yesterday affect the choices available to you today. It is easier for the Seattle area to maintain an aerospace industry, since one has grown there over the past century, than it would be for New Orleans to start one from scratch. The same applies to New York with finance, greater Boston with higher education and medicine, Houston with the energy business, and so on. Nations, regions, cities, and companies can of course change from one path to another�
�that’s why we speak of historic rises and declines. China’s development strategy over the past thirty years can be seen as one mammoth attempt to will itself onto the path of modern industrial development.
Through the half century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, aerospace developments in most of the world followed a path that was more or less similar from one country to another, but quite different from what China is attempting now. We naturally think of aviation as being a huge, concentrated enterprise that only a few global megafirms can afford to compete in. But in its early days, airplane inventors, designers, and entrepreneurs were at work on almost every continent, including those who started their own small companies before Bill Boeing did.
Many countries had nascent aerospace tech-business centers. Apart from the United States, they included Australia, Brazil, Canada, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and more. In most of them the sequence that eventually led to an aircraft industry was more or less the same. First there was the rapid spread of a hobbyist approach to aviation, typified by the barnstorming culture of daredevil pilots and air shows. Everything about flying in those days was hazardous. Orville Wright himself was nearly killed in a crash at Fort Myer, just outside Washington, D.C., in 1908, when the Wrights were demonstrating their airplane to the U.S. Army in order to qualify for military contracts. His passenger, the young army lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, who died in the crash and was later buried in Arlington Cemetery, is generally considered to be the first person ever killed in an airplane accident.
But even as the barnstorming era sustained public excitement about aviation, three longer-term “real” markets for airplanes and air services began to emerge: the military; airmail transport; and the bare beginnings of a passenger-airline business. The sagas of those early decades are very much like recent accounts of the evolution of computer and Internet start-ups: Entrepreneurs across the United States, Europe, South America, and elsewhere founded their small aircraft companies in a warehouse or a barn. Most failed in the short run—or, if they survived, were taken over by competitors. Even so, to a large extent these companies, reflecting their founders’ energies and ambitions, managed to push the technological or commercial frontiers of aerospace at least slightly forward while they were around. Although Bill Boeing’s name is now the best known of those early innovators, through aviation’s early decades he was a small player in a field that attracted people already well known for other successes. Henry Ford branched out from cars to make the popular Ford Tri-Motor, which was a refinement of a Fokker design from the Netherlands. During World War II, Ford’s Willow Run assembly plant became the world’s largest aircraft-production facility. Howard Hughes, of course, built his Spruce Goose. Geoffrey De Havilland founded and led what became Britain’s most important aircraft company. Ryan, Northrop, Grumman, Sikorsky, McDonnell, Douglas, Fairchild, Vought, Curtiss, and many others had names that for a while were synonymous with aircraft—as did the Loughead brothers of California, with their Lockheed company.8 They had their counterparts across Europe. In the Soviet Union, where the state made all the airplanes, the famous names were of the designers: Antonov, Ilyushin, Tupolev.
Aircraft made their combat debut during World War I. Despite the celebrated exploits of aces like Germany’s Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, and America’s Eddie Rickenbacker, air power was not a decisive factor for either side. Yet even by that stage military contracts had become crucial to keeping the Wrights and their emulators in business. The Navy ordered fifty of Boeing’s Model-C planes, the ones designed by Wong Tsu, which represented the new Boeing company’s most important early sale. In the 1930s, the first instrument navigation systems were developed in the United States and England. These allowed pilots to keep airplanes under control and on course even when flying through clouds or at night, rather than crashing as they frequently did if trying to “fly blind”—without instrument guidance. In the last two years of World War II, the first practical jet engines were developed, by German engineers who produced the Messerschmitt 262. The combination of instrument guidance and jet propulsion gave aircraft lasting military and economic importance. Part of America’s “arsenal of democracy”—a surge in the building of military matériel that wore down the Axis powers—was its increase from producing four thousand airplanes in 1940 to a hundred thousand in 1944.
A nationwide airmail network was in place across the United States by the mid-1920s,9 with mail sacks and small parcels carried on airplanes that the U.S. Post Office owned and operated. In 1925, the right to carry mail was transferred to commercial carriers, where it formed a significant stream of dependable income as these carriers began building passenger-travel networks. Two years later, Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic increased international excitement about aviation so much that, within the two years after that, worldwide investment in airplane and airline companies tripled. Even through the Depression of the 1930s, the improvements in speed, safety, and comfort of passenger planes made the airlines one of the few growing industries in the United States. It was during the 1930s that coast-to-coast travel first became faster by air than by rail. After this came the airpower-heavy combat of World War II; the commercialization of jet travel in the late 1950s; and the subsequent revolution in business, leisure, and family patterns around the world made possible by ever-safer and, for a while, ever-cheaper airline travel.
While so much was happening in so many parts of the world in the decades after the Wright brothers’ flight, almost nothing of the sort was happening in China. China had warfare, revolution, and turmoil through nearly the first eighty years of the twentieth century. It was cut off, by design and by circumstances, from the mainstreams of technical competition and innovation everywhere else.10 Despite the efforts of people like Wong Tsu and Feng Ru, it fell steadily further behind.
The first airplane flew in China in 1909, only six years after the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, but the gap between China’s standards and the world’s widened from that point on. The war, revolution, and tumult of the first half of the twentieth century made it hard for Chinese authorities to maintain roads and railroads, let alone invest in a new air-travel infrastructure. In principle, for an underdeveloped country with difficult geography, creating a network of airports can be a more economical and attractive way to link far-flung regions than trying to build railroads. To get supplies or travelers to Tibet or Qinghai, you need only pave a few square miles for airports and their support structures, not lay thousands of miles of track.
But building even those few airports was hard, given the chaos and poverty of the country at that state of development. As the main academic historian of Chinese aviation during this period has pointed out, aircraft need their own sort of land support, “a system of terrestrial navigation and communication facilities spread out along the route to provide navigation assistance and weather reports.”11 No one had the time, patience, money, or security to produce these systems in China. By the time of the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and China’s subsequent engulfment in revolution and war, there were only a handful of passenger flights operating in the country, and most were run by foreign companies like Pan Am.
Why China did it differently
By the time Mao’s government turned its attention to aviation, in the late 1950s, the path dependence of China’s transportation system made its choices different from those available in most other countries.
In Europe as in the United States, private flying, by hobbyists, tinkerers, and adventurers, came first. By the time of World War I the military was emerging as an important source of funding; and through the 1920s there was a diverse and quickly changing ecology of people who one way or another made a living through aviation: amateur flyers, crop dusters and air-show performers, military flyers, government airmail systems, and the early private airlines (an important one of which, United Air Lines, was spun off from Boeing in the 1930s).
Even the training of pilots was diversified. In Europe and North America, the military directly trained a number of pilots (many of whom eventually left to join the civilian airline fleets), and specialized “aeronautical universities”12 were created to train others, along with mechanics and air-traffic controllers. By the 1950s, the United States had built more than four thousand airfields, large and small, across the country. Some were military bases, some big commercial airports, some rural or private landing strips; some were civic booster projects to attract businesses to remote communities or make it easier for residents to reach big-city services. There were a lot of them, and the great majority offered small flying schools or repair shops too. Only a handful have been built since then, the most notable being Washington Dulles in the 1960s, Dallas–Fort Worth in the 1970s, and Denver International in the 1990s. Meanwhile hundreds of smaller airports have been closed.
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