China Airborne

by James Fallows

  Even before the bad publicity China suffered with the jailing of Liu Xiaobo and the Jasmine crackdowns, a scholar from the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Johan Lagerkvist, argued that China would likely lose more and more international support unless the government fundamentally reconceived its connections with the rest of the world.3 “China’s internal stability/security and survival of the Communist Party will always be more important to China’s leaders than the image it projects for outside consumption,” he contended. A choice between maintaining domestic order and pleasing outside critics was no choice at all. “Pouring money into Chinese equivalents to CNN and Al-Jazeera won’t help [without] reform initiatives,” he said.

  In every country, internal interests come first. With more time on the world stage, China’s leaders may learn to do what their American, British, French, and other counterparts also had to learn: at least feigning awareness of the interest of mankind. China’s predicament is more difficult because its emergence is so rapid, and so much is unclear about other ways in which it will change.

  I am sitting in Washington, D.C., as I write these words, and I realize how different the world feels to me than when I was sitting in Beijing, or Yinchuan, or Chengdu, or Linyi, with the chaos and achievement of Chinese efforts just outside my window. From a distance, it can seem strange to think that there are limits or challenges to China’s progress. The action, the sense of can-do, is so different from the political and economic paralysis of America’s age of constraint.

  But I know how much is in flux, and how much is at stake. It is not an evasion of analysis but a recognition of China’s complexity, and the world’s, to say that a wide range of outcomes is possible, and that it is worth watching very carefully signals like those I have mentioned to recalibrate our estimates. Nearly every day of these past five years—when watching the earth being scraped away for airports or highways, when seeing apartments put up within a week and the families who used to live in the knocked-down tenements sent scrambling to other parts of town, when seeing the beggars next to the Bentleys and the security agents watching students in the Internet cafés—I have thought to myself, How long can this go on? And nearly every day, when seeing those same sights, I have asked myself, What is this system not capable of? Anyone who says China is destined to succeed or fail, to open up or close down, either knows much more than I do, or much less. Anyone so sure is not willing to acknowledge the great unknowability of life in general and life in this quarter of mankind.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. In flying school, you learn when the instructor asks you to close your eyes and try to control the plane by seat-of-the-pants “feel” alone. When he tells you to open your eyes a minute later, you are inevitably in a spiral toward the ground. Minus the instructor, this is the story of the John F. Kennedy, Jr., accident; he had not yet been trained in these “instrument rules” flying skills and got into an irrecoverable spiral when he lost sight of the horizon in the evening mist over the ocean.

  1: This Is Going to Be Big

  1. If curious, you can test this yourself: look for any big Chinese city on an online map from Google, Bing, or other major providers, then click back and forth between “map” and “satellite” views. In most other parts of the world, the two views align. For Chinese cities, they’re slightly mismatched, by margins of perhaps ten or twenty meters. What’s marked as a road in the map view might be the middle of an apartment block in the satellite view.

  2. As the passage in a speech by Wen Jiabao said, “We will organize the implementation of industrial innovation and development projects, including those on National Broadband Internet Agenda, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, integrated circuits, flat-panel displays, space infrastructure, regional aircraft and industrialization of general aviation aircraft, as well as major application and demonstration, projects on the health of the people and on using information technology to benefit the people.” From the official English version of the plan as carried by China Real Time Report, “China NPC 2011: The Reports,” Wall Street Journal, March 5, 2011, http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/03/05/china-npc-2011-reports-full-text/.

  3. Of many theories about Buick’s present popularity in China, the one I like best involves spillover glamour from its days as a Rolls-Royce-style imported luxury marque in the precommunist era, especially in Westernized Shanghai.

  4. Xin Dingding, “Aviation Sector Has High Hopes for Next 5 Years,” China Daily, February 25, 2011. http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-02/25/

  content_12077726.htm.

  5. Lu Haoting, “China May Lead Global Aviation Recovery,” China Daily, September 17, 2009. http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2009-09/17/

  content_8701529.htm.

  6. Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, “Air China Value Greater than United-Continental, American, JetBlue, AirTran & US Air Combined,” March 9, 2011. http://www.centreforaviation.com/analysis/air-china-value-greater-than-united-continental-american-jetblue-airtran—us-air-combined-pt-1-47146.

  7. Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, “World Airport Rankings 2010,” March 16, 2011. http://www.centreforaviation.com/analysis/world-airport-rankings-2010-big-changes-to-global-top-30-beijing-up-to-2-heathrow-falls-to-4-47882, and http://www.centreforaviation.com/analysis/world-airport-rankings-2010-hong-kong-eclipses-memphis-as-the-worlds-busiest-cargo-hub-47887.

  8. He meant small aircraft, which are roughly ten times more numerous than the large passenger craft in all commercial airlines’ fleets.

  9. “Details Emerge About the Hurun Report’s New Magazine for Chinese Billionaires, ‘Wings & Water,’ ” Jing Daily, March 16, 2011. http://www.jingdaily.com/en/luxury/details-emerge-about-the-hurun-reports-new-magazine-for-chinese-billionaires-wings-water. The Chinese name for the new magazine was simply Qing, essentially “Lift Up.”

  10. “The Chinese Private Jet Industry—Set to Soar,” PrivateFly, January 11, 2011. http://blog.privatefly.com/?p=331.

  11. Mo Lingjiao, “China’s First Private and Business Jet Expo Sparks Controversy,” Global Times, August 16, 2010. http://en.huanqiu.com/china/society/2010-08/564149.html.

  12. Thomas A. Horne, “China on the March,” AOPA Online. http://www.aopa.org/aircraft/articles/2011/111009-china-on-the-march.html.

  2: Getting off the Ground

  1. By military convention, whatever aircraft is carrying the incumbent President is known during that flight as Air Force One—or Marine One in the case of presidential helicopters, Executive One if it is a civilian aircraft, or Navy One if it is a naval aircraft like the one in which George W. Bush flew to a carrier deck during the “Mission Accomplished” ceremonies of 2003. Because the newly sworn-in President, Lyndon Johnson, was on the same flight that carried Kennedy and his widow back to Washington, that plane was still Air Force One.

  2. Mark Dougan, A Political Economy Analysis of China’s Civil Aviation Industry (New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 22. As Dougan, an Australian academic, put it, “Because China is so large and so geographically diverse, a coordinated transportation infrastructure was traditionally viewed as both essential to and a reflection of a ruling regime’s power and authority.” One of the many Americans who have worked in China’s aviation development put it this way: “I think Chinese officials wonder whether there has ever been a really strong country that didn’t have a strong aerospace sector.”

  3. Da Hsuan Feng, “The Legacy of Tsu Wong: From Boeing’s Genesis to NCKU,” iTainan, January 1, 2008. http://www.itainan.org/forum/legacy-tsu-wong-%28%E7%8E%8B%E5%8A%A9%29%3A-boeing%E2%80%99s-genesis-ncku.

  4. For more on Wong Tsu, see “Wong Tsu in 1916,” China National Aviation Corporation, undated. http://www.cnac.org/wongtsu01.pdf; Global Security, “Kuomintang Aviation,” undated. http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/

  aviation-history-12.htm; Eve Dumovich, “The 1st and the Best,” Boeing Frontiers, December 2006, http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2006/

>   december/ts_sf12.pdf.

  5. “Feng Ru,” ChinaCulture.org, undated. http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_aboutchina/2003-09/

  24/content_26559.htm.

  6. This account of Feng Ru’s aviation history draws from Rebecca Maksel, “The Father of Chinese Aviation,” Smithsonian Air & Space magazine, August 2008. http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/The_Father_of_Chinese_Aviation.html; also Patti Gully, Sisters of Heaven (San Francisco: Long River Press, 2007).

  7. Tai Ming Cheung, “Remaking Cinderella: The Nature and Development of China’s Aviation Industry,” testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing on “China’s Emergent Military Aerospace and Commercial Aviation Capabilities. Panel IV: China’s Aviation Industrial Complex,” May 20, 2010, p. 3.

  As part of this testimony he also said, “The aviation industry has more than 130 large and medium-sized factories and research institutes employing 250,000 workers scattered across the country, especially in the deep interior, and often possessing the same manufacturing and research attributes. But intense rivalry, local protectionism, and huge geographical distances mean that there is little cooperation or coordination among these facilities, preventing the ability to reap economies of scale, engage in innovation clustering, and also hampering efforts at consolidation.”

  8. On the general evolution of aircraft companies in the early decades, see U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission, History of Flight, “The First U.S. Aircraft Manufacturing Companies,” 2003. http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Aerospace/

  earlyU.S/Aero1.htm.

  9. History of Flight, “Commercial Aviation: the 1920s.” http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/

  Commercial_Aviation/1920s/Tran1.htm.

  10. Dougan, A Political Economy, pp. 38ff.

  11. Ibid., p. 39.

  12. The best known of these, Embry-Riddle, itself exemplifies the diverse and chaotic business conditions of aviation’s early days. A wealthy aviation enthusiast, T. Higbee Embry, joined with a former military pilot and air-show performer, John Paul Riddle, to form the Embry-Riddle company in Cincinnati in 1925. They sold airplanes, carried airmail, and offered flight instruction. By 1930, their flying services were absorbed into the newly formed American Airlines. A few years later, Riddle led the development of what became the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Florida.

  13. Dougan, A Political Economy, p. 56. “The quality of the aircraft which would have had to be used were so inferior to what other industrialized countries were using, that it would have been an embarrassment to the government and detrimental to its image abroad.”

  3: The Men from Boeing

  1. E. E. Bauer, China Takes Off: Technology Transfer and Modernization (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), p. 5. “Small clouds of vapor rose from each silent figure as we waited in the dimly lighted interior. In an all-saving society, there was no logic in heating the massive terminal building during the night.”

  2. Bauer, China Takes Off, p. 101.

  3. At the time, Boeing’s main competitors were other American companies, Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas. By the early 2000s, after Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed merged with Martin Marietta and stopped making commercial aircraft, the main competition for large passenger airliners was, of course, the national-champion battle between Boeing and Europe’s Airbus. This is the battle that China aspired to join with its national champion, C919.

  4. Bauer, China Takes Off, p. 31.

  5. Ibid., p. 32.

  6. Ibid., p. 177. Bauer gave this example: “The deputy director of maintenance stood attentively on the ramp, watching. He took no notes and reported nothing; it was not his job. Also watching were at least twenty maintenance and ground personnel. Of course, none of them would report it, either. To report would put them in double jeopardy. First, they were supposed to be minding their own business, and, second, criticism of the planning unit would be taken unkindly. Our interpreter, watching with us, would never dare to utter a word. Most frustrating of all, the controllers would be reluctant to criticize the planning orders. They could only laugh among themselves, passing the event off as a joke.”

  7. Randy Baseler, “China Rocks!” Randy’s Journal, April 20, 2006. http://www.boeing.com/randy/archives/2006/

  04china_rocks.html. Also, Embassy of the People’s Republic of China in the United States, “President Hu Jintao Arrives in Seattle for US Visit,” April 25, 2006. http://www.china-embassy.org/eng/zmgx/zmsbzyjw/c1/111/t248787.htm; and Associated Press, “In Visit to Boeing, Hu Emphasizes Trade,” Boston Globe, April 20, 2006. http://articles.boston.com/2006-04-20/news/

  29246222_1_president-hu-jintao-china-trade-deficit.

  8. With the quaint earnestness that would be recognizable to anyone who had listened to official Chinese rhetoric, he closed his remarks by expressing confidence that “beneficial cooperation and win-win outcome” between the United States and China would “fly further and higher, just like a Boeing plane.”

  9. For more information on this crash, see the online Air Disaster searchable database, http://www.airdisaster.com/cgi-bin/view_details.cgi?date=05081997®=B-2925&airline=China+Southern+Airlines.

  10. For background on Yang’s career, see the ChinaVitae Web site, http://www.chinavitae.com/biography/Yang_Yuanyuan%7c313. The site is the most easily available English-language source on Chinese government officials.

  4: The Chinese Master Plan

  1. Tom Orlik, “China’s Ties That Bind,” Wall Street Journal, August 26, 2011. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111904875

  404576530361948603924.html. “Diminishing returns from more roads and railways and continued efforts to constrain a real-estate bubble mean the scope for investment to step into the breach a second time if foreign demand disappoints is limited.… China’s real weakness is that the gap in GDP left by retreating exports has been filled not by a sustainable increase in domestic consumption but by more investment.”

  2. The energy business illustrates the phenomenal reliance on infrastructure construction. After the Japanese tsunami and nuclear disaster in 2011, the world’s survey of nuclear plants showed that more new plants (nearly thirty) were under construction in China than in the rest of the world combined. A similar pattern prevails in coal-fired plants, solar- and wind-powered installations, and almost any other kind of heavy investment.

  3. Without getting too much into the details: China’s national savings rate has in recent years been about half of its GDP. That is different from saying that each Chinese family saves half of its earnings, although some of them may. Rather it reflects the share of “consumption” in the whole national economy, which accounts for only half of what the Chinese economy produces. The rest is either exported for foreigners to buy, with the proceeds often turned into T-Note holdings in the United States, or devoted to capital projects inside China.

  4. Damien Ma, “Is Chinese Growth Sustainable?” The Atlantic, August 18, 2011. http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/

  08/is-chinese-growth-sustainable/243795/.

  5. The transition from one Chinese leader to another takes a couple of years, because of the staggered schedule on which various power bases in the Communist Party, the Military Commission, and the government are transferred.

  6. Casey was the subject of a cover story I did in The Atlantic: James Fallows, “China Makes, the World Takes,” The Atlantic, July/August 2007.

  7. Andrew Batson, “Not Really Made in China,” Wall Street Journal, December 15, 2010. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870

  4828104576021142902413796.html.

  8. It is known in Chinese as Hon Hai, or Fushi Kang.

  9. Helen H. Wang, “Myth of China’s Manufacturing Prowess,” March 10, 2010. http://helenhwang.net/2010/03/myth-of-manufacturing/. Emphasis added.

  10. These accounts are from a foreign blogger who goes by the name Tom: “Four Jobs That Highlight China’s Ineffeciency,” Seei
ng Red in China, May 17, 2011. http://seeingredinchina.com/2011/05/17/four-jobs-that-highlight-china%E2%80%99s-inefficiency/. “Perhaps the most perplexing example of this I’ve seen was in Chengdu at the Sichuan Museum,” he wrote. “The museum was free to enter but it employed 3 people to hand out tickets, and two more to check them.”

  11. Here is one illustration, from an assessment early in 2011 of the Twelfth Five-Year Plan: “Goal #6. Create an innovation driven society by encouraging education and training of the workforce.

  “The plan seeks to shift China from its role as the factory of the world to a new role as a technological innovator for the world. There are two components to this approach:

  • China will need to become a domestic innovator in all areas of current modern technology, with an emphasis on practical industrial applications.

  • Where China is not capable of domestic innovation, China will continue to import technology from advanced economies. However, China will seek to actively domesticate that technology through a program of ‘assimilate and re-invent.’ The recent program for production in engines for high speed rail is offered as an example of the ‘assimilate and re-invent’ approach.

  Dan Harris, “China’s 12th Five Year Plan: A Preliminary Look,” China Law Blog, March 3, 2011. http://www.chinalawblog.com/2011/03/

  chinas_12th_five_year_plan_a_preliminary_look.html.

  12. State Council of the People’s Republic of China, “China National Environmental Protection Plan in the Eleventh Five-Years (2006–2010).” http://english.mep.gov.cn/down_load/Documents/200803/

  P020080306440313293094.pdf. The paper went on, “The quality of coastal marine environment is at risk.… The number of days with haze in some big and medium sized cities has some increase, and acid rain pollution is not alleviated.… The phenomena of no strict observation of laws, little punishment to lawbreakers, poor law enforcement and supervision are still very common.” And on through a very long list, with this stark conclusion: “China is facing [a] grim situation in addressing climate change.”