China Airborne

by James Fallows

  • And of course there is the largest movement of people in human history, the billion or so trips made each year at Spring Festival time, or lunar new year, which usually occurs between mid-January and early February. The 2009 documentary Last Train Home captured the predictable crisis and drama of the migrations: there are not enough seats, and train tickets are generally not sold for round trips. You have to wait in line at one station to get the outbound ticket, and then wait in line at the other station, in the other city, to get a ticket for the trip back. Think for a moment about the stress and inconvenience this creates.

  The Spring Festival train and bus rides are events of surprising sociological, economic, logistic, and emotional consequence. Sociological, in that the holiday is the one time each year when families are reunited—if the journey is impossible for some reason, the opportunity is lost. Economic, not just because the industrial engine halts for a period but also because many employees use this time to shop for better work offers, or they decide not to return to the factories at all. It also is an obvious blip in China’s export and import behavior. The variable calendar date of the Spring Festival, like that of Easter or Passover in the West, explains why January or February will show abnormal statistics one year or another. It is of logistic importance because each year’s journey is a gamble on whether people will be able to get home and then back again. And it is emotional on an epic scale matched mainly by visits during wartime. Will the family still be there? Will my child still know me? Will my parents think I have changed, or gone wrong?

  There are other complications too, affecting China’s drive to modernize and the role of simple physical movement in that process. They involve the special role of western China, especially the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, and the uneasy balance between the Chinese military—weak in international terms, strong as an internal factor—in allowing the country to move ever more freely.

  5 * An Airport in the Wilderness

  “The emperor is far away …”

  One day in June 2009, I had a longer discussion than normal with a taxi driver outside our apartment building in Beijing. I was trying to convince him, in Chinese, that when I said I wanted to go to “the airport”—dao jichang qu—I wasn’t talking about the main international airport, Beijing Capital, where every foreigner he’d ever carried had wanted to go.

  Instead my destination was the small, almost rural-seeming Nanyuan Airport on the south edge of town. Pedal-cart drivers lazed outside under trees along the narrow road into this airport, waiting for customers but not appearing to expect any very soon. Passengers who were departing went from the terminal to their airplanes not through enclosed jetways but across the open tarmac, which was edged with trees. From Nanyuan, one of China’s odder minor airlines—China United, owned and operated by the People’s Liberation Army—ran flights to small inland destinations, in my case, the relatively large inland destination of Xi’an.

  This would be my first-ever trip on China United Airlines, which, as with many other domestic carriers, filled its seats up from the back. There were only thirty or so passengers for a Boeing 737 that could have held more than a hundred, and we were sent back to fully occupy the last few rows in the plane. (Once the door was closed, the passengers scrambled around to take empty seats.) I stayed in the rear, in a window seat, and settled down to watch the scenery on the two-hour flight to Xi’an.

  To the world, Xi’an is, of course, known for its army of terra-cotta warriors. In China, it is known as the capital of the arid western coal-and-farming province of Shaanxi (not to be confused with the neighboring and also coal-producing province of Shanxi—the difference is more obvious in Chinese: versus ) and as the modern site of the ancient Imperial capital of Chang’an. Many of the city walls from the Imperial era remain, enclosing among other features a mosque in the city’s Muslim quarter.

  To the aspiring Chinese aviation community, Xi’an is known as one of several potential seats of a new aerospace boom, a combination of Kitty Hawk, Aspen, Teterboro Airport, and Everett, Washington: a place where important things will be born; where elite travelers will fly in on holiday; where business jets will congregate; and where airliners will be built for customers around the world. Each of these goals reflects an aspect of the ones that China has set for its development. The question is how did they all strangely come together in the place on the far outskirts of Xi’an called the Luyanghu Integrated General Aviation Development Zone, near a provincial center called Weinan?

  Francis Chao and Gao Yuanyang

  The trip of a number of international aviation enthusiasts to Weinan was part of the Fourth Annual China General Aviation Forum. I had come along at the invitation of its organizer and impresario, Francis Chao, a Taiwanese-American in his fifties. Around the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chao had begun to think that sooner or later a business-aviation boom was destined to come to China. The people then just starting to consider BMWs and Mercedeses would eventually be looking to Lamborghinis and Bentleys, and after that to Gulfstreams and Learjets and fancy personal helicopters from brands like Robinson. As China’s road and rail networks improved, so eventually would its airports and aviation infrastructure. Chao had worked in the 1990s as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense, the FAA, and other federal agencies, providing interpretation and other support in their dealings with China and Taiwan. Early in the George W. Bush Administration, when a People’s Liberation Army naval fighter plane collided with a U.S. Navy EP-3 electronic-surveillance plane over the South China Sea, he worked with the Pentagon negotiating team to calm a potentially volatile confrontation. A few months earlier, in a project for the FAA, he escorted a delegation from the CAAC to the AirVenture summer air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, so they could have a sense of the scale of general aviation in the United States and its potential for China. He sensed the potential too and decided that he could play a role in connecting an emerging aviation community in China with its established counterparts in the United States. The connections would include commercial ties, since many of the goods and services that Chinese customers would be looking for would come, at least initially, from companies and experts in the United States.

  The first time I met Chao, at an aerospace expo in Beijing in the fall of 2006, I didn’t fully appreciate how emblematic his chosen role was. As I traveled over the next few years to more parts of the country and watched more businesses in their high-speed and often unplanned process of development, I saw again and again the importance of the cultural interpreter, or middleman, playing the Mr. China role. “Mr. China” was a term given jokey immortality by the British writer and businessman Tim Clissold, in his book of the same name. It referred to the crucial niche in the business ecology occupied by the Chinese or foreign intermediary who becomes an indispensable guide for outsiders hoping to do business in modern China. On one side are international companies large or small who sense that somehow they have to “get into” China because of its vast potential. On the other side are the complexities, confusions, and constant changes of customers and operating rules on the Chinese side.

  The people who know how to make the connections are enormously valuable—and a large number of them, for natural linguistic and cultural reasons, are ethnically Chinese people like Chao from mainland China or Taiwan who had immigrated to or studied in the West. The middleman role naturally attracts its share of charlatans, and foreign companies often have to rely on hunch or trial and error to determine whether someone who is good at languages and claims to “understand the real China” really has any business skills or knows what he is talking about.

  Francis Chao does in fact have entrepreneurial and organizational skills, and he knows about aviation, and over the years he had cultivated contacts in China that would, he hoped, pay off whenever the aerospace boom finally came. In 1998, he published the first edition of the China Civil Aviation Report, which came out quarterly from his offices in Northern California. Each summer starting
in 2001 he organized a China General Aviation Forum, at which a rotating cast of Western businesspeople met their Chinese counterparts and discussed prospects for aviation in China. In the late 2000s, Chao also produced and distributed some forty thousand copies of a glossy 130-page Chinese-language booklet called What Is General Aviation? () as part of an effort to convince Chinese regulators of the benefits of opening up their airspace to private flight.

  By 2009, he felt he had made a breakthrough of sorts. It was not at the national level of high politics or policy but with a modest, soft-spoken, local academic-technocrat. The man in question, Gao Yuanyang, was officially the assistant mayor of Weinan Town but unofficially was one of the many idealistic dreamers in the provinces of China.

  Gao, who was born in the remote southern province of Guizhou in 1963 and therefore was too young to be affected by much of the tumult of the Cultural Revolution years, had been trained in Beijing as an aeronautical engineer. Through the first ten years of his career he worked as a technician at the Guizhou Aviation Industry Group, near his original hometown. In 1999, he got an appointment teaching at his prestigious alma mater, BeiHang University—the name, , is a “Caltech”-type shorthand for Beijing Hangkong Hangtian Daxue, the Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 2005, as a sign of his success and as part of his professional development, he was sent for a year as a visiting scholar to the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley.

  “I was sponsored by the government, so of course I had to do what they wanted when I came back,” Gao told me in English when I first met him, with Francis Chao, in Beijing, shortly before the GA Forum. What the government wanted was for him to go spend a few years in Weinan, which was roughly comparable to a New Yorker’s being assigned to a small city in Kansas, while his wife and child stayed back in Beijing. In Weinan he was assigned his post as assistant mayor—since elections apply only up to the village level in China, mayor and governor are appointed Party positions.

  Rather than just wait out his posting, Gao decided to embrace a dream: to make this remote part of Shaanxi province into an international center for aviation research, sport flying, ecotourism, and luxury vacation sites. If his plans succeeded, the Weinan environs would attract high-end tourists from China and the rest of the world, and, meanwhile, would be an international center of aerospace development. The starting points for the dream were the elements that Weinan and its boosters considered its natural assets. These included a nearby marshland that in principle could become a tourist-attracting wildlife refuge; a local musical culture that featured a historic sort of Chinese folk-blues singing; and one of the country’s bona fide and established tourist draws, a towering granite peak called Huashan. (Imagine a less stark version of Yosemite’s El Capitan, with steep walkways, and bearers carrying heavy loads—small refrigerators, five-gallon water bottles, full cases of beer—up the thousand-plus steps to the cafés at the top.) With its location on the edge of Xi’an’s vast aerospace-industrial complex, which was sited in keeping with Mao’s concern of staying as far as possible out of enemy bomber range, greater Weinan had potential that was almost too obvious.

  “We will make history!” Gao said. “Weinan is the dead center of China. This can be a plus! For charters, for UPS, for FedEx. You can get anywhere in an hour and a half”—this was the logic that led to the choice of Memphis as the hub for FedEx—“and you’ve got the huge aviation base in Xi’an.”

  Since this was China, would their next step be lobbying for a grant from the national government in Beijing? That approach would fit outside views of a centrally guided Chinese juggernaut, with dictates being handed down from on high, with funding too. Some big projects do operate that way, from the Olympic development to parts of the high-speed rail system. But in reality Gao and his Weinan team knew that, as with most Chinese development projects, the money would come mainly from city and county sources. The local governments’ contributions might come in the form of free or low-cost leases for land; new roads, factory buildings, or other facilities built at public cost; tax holidays; favorable loans from banks allied with the local governments; investments from local tycoons; or all of these and more.

  “They have given their blessing,” Gao told me before our trip to Weinan, meaning that the development of local resorts and high-tech zones fit the larger scheme of a richer, more sophisticated China laid out in the revered Eleventh Five-Year Plan. It had been several years since he had spoken English regularly as a student at Berkeley, and he seemed both proud to be trying it out again on me and tentative in looking for words. “But …” at this point Francis Chao, the former interpreter, stepped in to say, “If this was going to be top-down, the government would step in to build the airport and buy the planes. With bottom-up, we have the local government involved.”

  Gao had arranged for eight other people from BeiHang to be put on semipermanent assignment to Weinan. Through Chao and others, city officials were in constant touch with investors, customers, and partners from around the world to work on projects. Their ambitions were practically unlimited and went in more hopeful directions than I can begin to recount here.

  “We have the pilots,” Gao said. “And we can have the mechanics. We need to learn the modern aviation mechanical skills! So why not bring in all the old abandoned airplanes from the U.S.? The ones they store in the desert. They might give them to us for free! Or for a low fee.

  “We could bring them to China. We could upgrade and refit them. We could buy the spare parts and then learn how to build them. Our mechanics could touch the planes, and tear them apart, and put them back together again. Once we can fix it, then we can sell it! Maybe the U.S. won’t take the planes back after we fix them. But there are other purchasers. There might be people who would be glad to have an airplane just for fun. This kind of airplane would be easy to register.

  “We will have a flying school. We would have all the ingredients for an aerospace industry. We would be using aircraft in our everyday life!” At this first meeting, Assistant Mayor Gao saw where it all could lead. And Francis Chao expanded on the vision. “In China, we know that everyone tries to jump in on the same thing once it seems to work,” he said. “So many people would want to copy this model of success! Our goal is not just to build the program but to build a model. Like a franchise! Connect the dots all around the country, and we would have a little piece of each dot.”

  Big-man politics, big dreams

  This was the prospect that drew us to Weinan. Each time I went to some new corner of China I was startled by details I had not previously made mental space for before. That was the case in Weinan—I had not previously seen a huge runway surrounded by nothingness in the Chinese interior. But in other ways the fundamentals of this boosterish project resembled many others I had seen over the years.

  The effort depended not simply on visionaries and dreamers, as represented in their different ways by the middleman Francis Chao and the aerospace bureaucrat Gao Yuanyang. It also depended on the support or at least thumbs-up verdict of the charismatic local Big Man, in this case the Communist Party boss for the Weinan area, a man in his late forties named Liang Fengmin.

  If the phrase “regional Communist Party boss in China” calls up any image it might be of the laughably stiff figures seen on the commercial screen or stage. But Chairman Liang, like many of his counterparts whom I met in other provinces, was anything but reserved or formal. The instant I laid eyes on him, it became apparent what dramatic role he had cast himself in. He bore a strong resemblance to Chairman Mao in his prime, and he seemed to play up the similarities. His hair was slicked back, Mao style. He struck poses, cocked his head, and held his cigarette in ways immediately familiar from photos of Mao.

  Twelve hours after starting out from my apartment in Beijing, I was toasting the Weinan Party leaders at an introductory reception and banquet. Through the following day of meetings and briefings the chairman said very little but nodded appreciatively as he took in the presentations
about how much money the city would have to commit, and how glorious the payoff might be for the future of Weinan. When reading academic studies of how China ended up spending so incredibly much on infrastructure projects, I had seen countless reminders that the driving force was often a local booster effort. Businesses in a city or county—land developers, construction-firm owners, bankers, the equivalent of the Chamber of Commerce—convinced the local government or the Party boss that a new road, bridge, or shopping mall would be good for business all around. From the Party boss’s point of view, every new project could mean an extra point in his area’s GDP growth rate, which until recently had been by far the most important measure of success and grounds for promotion. (In the late 2000s, environmental measures were added to the report card for communist cadres, and of course maintaining order and containing dissent was obligatory.) The meetings in Weinan are what that prospect looked like up close. This was one element of the Weinan story that struck me as emblematic of much of recent Chinese hyper-development: the crucial role of local developers, officeholders, bankers, and boosters, rather than central-government planners directing development from afar.

  As is usual in Chinese business gatherings, the daytime discussions were followed by a celebratory sealing-the-deal banquet. As the toasts went on and the new rounds of delicacies appeared, Chairman Liang dropped his reserve and seemed to take more and more kindly to the plan. It looked as if the project could proceed.

  The second familiar and representative element in Weinan was the sheer scale of the investment in infrastructure, beyond what any “normal” reckoning of risks and opportunities might support. The day after the crucial bonding dinner with Chairman Liang, Assistant Mayor Gao, and other big men of the town, the visiting delegation rolled through the countryside to what was … an enormous new runway and paved area, with nothing around it but construction equipment. The idea behind this “trial zone” was that the Weinan area could have three small airports within a few dozen miles of each other. Planes could fly back and forth among them and eventually create an aerospace infrastructure! Tourists would come, and economic growth would follow.