China Airborne

by James Fallows

  But the realities behind the scale and numbers, in aviation as in so many other aspects of China’s development, are more complicated, sometimes less impressive, and always more interesting than they seem from afar. The comedy and infighting that coexist with grandiose national planning; the corruption and small-town parochialism that give policies such a different effect in the hinterland than was intended in the capital—these apply in aviation as they do in the “green tech” boom, the boom in higher education, and many other areas. The biggest difference between being a foreigner inside China and watching it as a foreigner from outside is how much more precarious and uneven the state of China’s “success” seems from within, and the different view one gets as to how China’s growth will affect the rest of the world.

  The many stories that make “the China story”

  There is no one China story or “complete” picture of China. That is the theme I stressed repeatedly in the Atlantic articles I wrote while I was living in China and that also guides this narrative. The first step toward reckoning with what is knowable about China’s rise is remembering how diverse and contradictory conditions within the country can seem to be. Trends both good and bad in China’s development can be identified, but every one of them has its exceptions and uncertainties.

  Perhaps the strongest and most important of these general trends in China is the sense that things are possible. Many Americans and Europeans have that in their personal lives; it’s very strong for those in the scientific, technological, and pop-culture businesses, but it has all but vanished from public life in many developed countries. The electorates in most of North America, Europe, and Japan know very well what their countries’ main problems are. They just lack any belief that their governments will grapple with those problems or even that governments should try. China’s problems are far worse and more obvious, starting with the rampant pollution and thoroughgoing environmental destruction that have become the nation’s major public-health threat and challenge to its long-term development. But three decades into the modernization kicked off by Deng Xiaoping, most people seem to imagine that problems will be solved, or at least that life will be better five years from now than it was five years ago.

  The part of Chinese ambition that is channeled into aerospace parallels this larger trend, and its progress in this field is a close marker of its overall modernization. In the 1980s, China’s airlines were antiquated and genuinely dangerous. Through most of the past ten years, they have been statistically among the safest in the world, and more comfortable than most in North America or Europe. Who remembers the last Economy Class seat on a U.S. airline that came with a meal as part of the price? I cannot remember being on a Chinese airline flight of any duration that did not include a hot meal—usually fish, chicken, or pork with either rice or noodles. The old airline system was a proxy for China’s general backwardness, and the current one is an indicator of its progress and ambition, in surprisingly revealing ways.

  Designing and building modern airplanes is even more complex than it seems, incorporating simultaneous advances on many separate technological fronts. Materials science (so the planes can be lighter and stronger), engine design (so they can fly more reliably on less fuel), electronics and avionics (as the plane’s control systems and sensors become one enormous interconnected computer), large-scale coordination of supply chains and performance schedules, and more. Running a successful airline requires a combination of retail-level customer-handling skills, to keep the level of hatred and frustration felt by the flying public from driving them away from air travel altogether, and complex integration of route structure, fare changes, crew scheduling, the passenger-versus-cargo mix, and many other variables.

  At the national level, keeping air travel safe enough to seem First World rather than Third World is the most complex undertaking of all. It requires uniform maintenance and safety standards for airports in every remote corner of the country; a network of air-traffic controllers who know how to work within their own system and with the airlines’ pilots and dispatchers; the ability to collect accurate weather reports from around the country, and get them to pilots and controllers in real time, while feeding the data into supercomputers to forecast hazardous patterns; a system for training pilots, mechanics, and inspectors and indoctrinating them into a safety-first culture; check-and-balance procedures that detect and correct those not fully indoctrinated and that keep any individual or organization from taking too many risks; and more. A modern air-travel system also requires a degree of integration across national borders—U.S. planes flying across the Caribbean routinely talk with controllers in Havana—and across organizational boundaries within each country, since military, commercial, and civilian authorities must coordinate their use of airspace. Therefore it is not just techno-chauvinism that leads rising nations to think that a functioning aerospace and air-travel system is a meaningful indication of full-fledged development.

  Modern China is the world’s great success story at the “hard” elements of this achievement: creating infrastructure, lowering production costs, doing any- and everything at a great scale. But it has yet to show comparable sophistication with the “soft” ingredients necessary for a fully functioning, world-leading aerospace establishment. These include standards that apply consistently across the country, rather than depending on the whim and favor of local potentates. Or smooth, quick coordination among civil, military, and commercial organizations. Or sustaining the conditions—intellectual-property protection, reliable contract enforcement and rule of law, freedom of inquiry and expression—that allow first-rate research-and-developments institutions to thrive and to attract talent from around the world.

  If China can succeed fully in aerospace, then in principle there is very little it cannot do. The combination of economic power and autocratic political control that has made the Chinese story so successful thus far seems, from a Western perspective, to be self-limiting, because it is a contradiction. The Chinese model has worked to bring a mainly peasant economy into the low-wage manufacturing era. But—the reasoning goes—it will be hard to sustain the controls as more Chinese people become rich, urbane, independent-minded. Or, if the government insists on maintaining the controls, it will be hard to move the economy beyond the stage of reliance on low-wage industries and copycat goods.

  Aviation in all its aspects will be a test of these theories. For success, China will need the strengths it has already demonstrated, and ones it has yet to master.

  2 * Getting Off the Ground

  Starting out far behind

  A man who had served in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force before immigrating to the United States in the 1980s told me the following story of China’s introduction to the world of international aviation.

  As Henry Kissinger planned his secret trip to China in 1971, airport officials in Beijing were concerned. Kissinger would be arriving on a Boeing 707 operated by Pakistan International Airlines. To conceal the fact that he was going to China, Kissinger had feigned illness while on a trip to Pakistan, which explained his absence from official functions there. For extra security he traveled from Islamabad to Beijing not in an American-government aircraft but one from PIA, which had operated scheduled service to China since the mid-1960s.

  At the time, the 707 was one of the most recognizable aircraft in the world. It was the airplane that more than any other had made jet age intercontinental travel feasible in the 1960s. An Air Force version of the 707 also served in those days as Air Force One, as it had during one mission that commanded attention around the world: bringing John F. Kennedy’s body back from Dallas in 1963.1

  But 707s did not normally fly into the People’s Republic of China. Its airports were closed to most Western airlines, and its own commercial and military fleets used mainly Soviet-model airplanes. Would it have the right equipment to handle and service the plane? At an even more basic and potentially embarrassing level, how was Kissinger supposed to get from the airplane
onto the ground? When the 707’s doors opened, they would be some twenty feet above the runway, and at a different height from the Soviet-made planes. Would the VIP passengers have to jump, or climb, to reach the movable stairways the Beijing authorities already had on hand?

  According to my friend from the PLA Air Force, the Chinese officials did not want to buy or borrow a standard airport staircase from a Western supplier—such was their sensitivity about revelations of their technological isolation. Instead they built their own in a rush, using pictures and published specs of the 707. When Kissinger’s plane arrived they rolled out the staircase as if it were the most natural thing for them to be prepared for any sort of international aircraft.

  Forty years later, China’s President Hu Jintao took a nonstop flight from Beijing’s lavishly modernized Capital Airport to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, for his series of meetings with President Obama. He also traveled in a very familiar Boeing plane, the latest extended-range version of the 747, painted with the livery of Air China. There was an image of a big red Chinese flag near the nose of the plane, and, next to it, the logo of Star Alliance, which linked Air China with United, Lufthansa, ANA (All Nippon Airways), Air New Zealand, and many other international airlines.

  Kissinger’s trip underscored China’s apartness from the world; Hu Jintao’s its thorough connectedness. And one of the few elements that remained constant through this forty-year span—that officials of each government traveled to the other’s capital on U.S.-made Boeing planes—illustrated another aspect of China’s evolution and of the United States–Chinese interaction: the symbolic and also practical significance of American dominance in aerospace and aviation, a field in which China had ambitions but few achievements.

  With the unveiling of its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, and presumably with the plans that would come after it, the Chinese government announced its intention to close that gap, much as it had previously done in automobile production, electronics, clean-energy technology, and so many other areas. At the Asian Aerospace Expo in Hong Kong in 2011, COMAC—the Commercial Aircraft Group of China, the country’s intended long-term rival to Boeing and Airbus—presented a huge mock-up of the C919 commercial airliner whose development was then under way, as a prelude to a similar presentation a few months later at the Paris Air Show.

  When visitors walked into a full-scale model of a section of the cabin’s interior in Hong Kong, they could watch video renderings of a future in which Chinese-made airliners were taking passengers and potentates all around the world. They reminded me powerfully of the videos I had seen the previous year at the Shanghai World Expo, or that Americans who attended the New York World’s Fair of 1964 would have seen there. By the comparison I mean not that the Chinese presentations were out of date but that they were optimistic. The theme of their “let’s imagine!” videos was how much brighter, cleaner, and in all ways better a futuristic existence will be. I hope that someday the video that GM China produced for its Shanghai Expo pavilion will be taken on a world tour. It conveyed the same sense of futuristic marvel that I recall from visiting Disney’s Tomorrowland as a schoolchild in the early 1960s. A similar spirit guides the future-of-Chinese-aviation videos, with their depictions of suave Chinese businesspeople and happy Chinese families relaxing, enjoying the flight, and looking confidently toward what awaits them at their destination.

  That’s the goal—with airplanes, and with so many other aspects of life in China now. It is hard for rich-country residents—Europeans, North Americans, Japanese, Australians, New Zealanders, and others—to contemplate such simple joy in material progress without a slight mocking smile. For them, prosperity, in an overall sense, has been thoroughly taken for granted, for a long time, and the uneven and imperfect blessings of progress are well understood. But at least for people over the age of thirty in China, the excitement about modernization is still (largely) genuine and sincere.

  Elements of the plan

  China’s progress from the earliest days of aviation to its current aspirations to create the next Boeing resemble patterns in other areas where it has rushed to modernize. The main themes of that progress are:

  • The growth of this industry has been both guided and uncontrolled, at times chaotic and even outside the law.

  • It has depended upon efforts by both the country’s military and its civilian organizations, both government and business, both enormous state-owned entities and tiny private firms, both central-government guidance and entrepreneurial efforts from provinces and towns.

  • It has relied on and been shaped by foreigners, especially Americans, to a degree that few people inside or outside China recognize. Indeed, the transformation of China’s airline systems from one of the most dangerous in the world to one of the safest is largely a testament to underpublicized but highly important efforts by Chinese and American companies and governments.

  • Its successes and its impending limitations reflect the same schisms within China’s political leadership and tensions between central guidance and regional guidance that appear in many other areas.

  • Its efforts to build a modern air-travel system, in parallel with the road-building and track-laying whose effects are so obvious across China, reflect the central government’s sharp awareness of a challenge very similar to the one that propelled American development through the United States’s first century or so as a nation: the need to create physical connections across a continental nation of great geographic, cultural, and economic extremes.2

  Here is how they started and how they plan to bring it about.

  The Chinese pioneers

  In the headquarters of Boeing China’s offices, in the Pacific Plaza complex off the Third Ring Road on the east side of Beijing, there is a special small shrine to a Chinese technologist named Wong Tsu. Wong was born in Beijing in 1893. He was ten years old when the Wright brothers made their first flight at Kitty Hawk, and not yet twenty when the Qing Dynasty, which had ruled China since the 1640s, collapsed under its last sovereign, the “boy emperor” Puyi. When Wong Tsu was sixteen, during the turbulent final stages of the Qing decline, he was sent as a naval cadet to England for training—and then, as the regime fully collapsed, he went on to MIT, where he became a student in the very first aeronautical engineering program in the United States.3

  In 1916, as the Great War raged in Europe and as the forces of Sun Yat-sen were taking over China, Wong received his degree from MIT and also learned to fly, in a seaplane school in Buffalo. In that same year, Bill Boeing, a thirty-five-year-old Yale man who had worked in the timber industry, started an airplane company in Seattle. Wong moved out to Seattle and joined him as the new Boeing company’s first chief engineer.

  In the shrine at the Beijing office, along with portraits of Wong and testimonials about his work, there is a dramatic black-and-white photo taken in 1919 of Bill Boeing and Eddie Hubbard, one of the company’s first pilots. They are wearing the jackets and leather flying helmets we associate with photos of Lindbergh or Earhart; they are standing on a Puget Sound dock, with water lapping up just behind them. In one hand, Boeing is holding a canvas sack of mail. This was, in fact, the first international airmail shipment ever carried to the United States, which Boeing and Hubbard had brought from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Seattle. Behind them in the picture, on pontoons, is Boeing’s hugely important Model C seaplane, which was designed by Wong Tsu.

  For Beijing, the Model C was a commercial breakthrough. It was the first plane that Boeing had sold to the U.S. military, and also the first to be used in America for postal delivery.

  Military purchases and airmail contracts were how early airlines—and aircraft companies—paid for their development. From Bill Boeing onward, the company’s chief executives through the decades were careful to note that without Wong Tsu’s efforts, especially with the Model C, the company might not have survived the early years to become the dominant world aircraft manufacturer.4

  In 1918, Wong Tsu returned to
China, and over the next two decades he started to build an aviation industry there, in close cooperation with his former colleagues in England and the United States. As World War I was nearing its end, he founded the Mah-Wei aircraft company in southern coastal China, not far from the site where the computer-maker Dell now has its Chinese manufacturing center. There he oversaw production of the first genuinely Chinese airplane, the Sea Eagle, soon followed by the River Bird.

  In the late 1920s, Wong worked with a former partner from Boeing to found the Chinese National Aviation Corporation, in Shanghai. He became a colonel in the Chinese Army; he oversaw the construction of China’s first military-aircraft fleet. When the Japanese invaded, he went inland, first to Wuhan, along the Yangtze, and then to Kunming, in far southwestern Yunnan province, bordering Burma. During World War II, when Chinese factories were essentially cut off from international supplies, he designed all-bamboo gliders for carrying troops.

  But as civil war spread across the country after Japan’s surrender, Wong Tsu fled to Taiwan rather than to stay for life under Mao and the communists. He spent the next twenty years, until his death in 1965, teaching aeronautical engineering at a Taiwanese university rather than building airplanes.

  Overall he fared much better than the other most famous father of Chinese aviation. This was Feng Ru,5 an immigrant from Guangzhou in southern China who was known as Joe Fung, or Joe Fong in the Chinatowns of Oakland and San Francisco at the beginning of the twentieth century.