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China Airborne Kindle Edition
More than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. Chinese airlines expect to triple their fleet size over the next decade and will account for the fastest-growing market for Boeing and Airbus. But the Chinese are determined to be more than customers. In 2011, China announced its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. Its goal is to produce the Boeings and Airbuses of the future. Toward that end, it acquired two American companies: Cirrus Aviation, maker of the world’s most popular small propeller plane, and Teledyne Continental, which produces the engines for Cirrus and other small aircraft.
In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of this project and explains why it is a crucial test case for China’s hopes for modernization and innovation in other industries. He makes clear how it stands to catalyze the nation’s hyper-growth and hyper- urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America’s transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi’an, home to more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China’s pursuit of aerospace supremacy. He concludes by examining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and the rest of the world—and the right ways to understand it.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherVintage
- Publication dateMay 15, 2012
- File size1000 KB
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Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
Review
“Not only does the book benefit from Fallows’ keen observations as a journalist in China, but also it is enriched by his technical knowledge as a passionate aviator. The result is informative and lively.” —The Economist
“What sets China Airborne apart from other books on China's rise is Fallows' remarkable ability to analyze both China's unprecedented achievements in economic modernization and its inherent limitations. . . . The story so brilliantly told in China Airborne, a metaphor for the much bigger story of China's rise, suggests that no one should take its future as a superpower for granted.” —San Francisco Chronicle
“It is worth the reader’s time to obtain it and read it. It is a timely look at a country in a newly dangerous economic and political situation. Understanding that situation is of utmost importance to the rest of the world.” —Asia Sentinel
“Fallows has an earthy, engaging style, and he sees the human stories of government officials, entrepreneurs, workers and intellectuals all pursuing the dreams they have for themselves and their country as they take off together into the skies…The book is accessible in different ways to different people. Sinologists and aviation geeks like me will happily pore through Mr. Fallows' detailed endnotes, trapped at the back where they won't bother casual readers. People looking for a grab buy at the airport will find something light that will also make them think. Businesspeople, students, or tourists going to China can pick this up and get a good grip on the Chinese zeitgeist.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“Fallows keeps the reader engaged by weaving personal stories and lively personalities into his depiction of the changing aerospace landscape…his book makes for an intriguing read, looking at both sides of the picture: reasons for why China might succeed, as well as those for why the country might struggle.” —Publishers Weekly
“Prescient. . . . Highly readable and significant, Fallows’ book should not be missed by those seeking to understand America’s relationship with this global power.” —Booklist, starred review
“Precise yet accessible. . . . An enjoyable, important update on an enigmatic economic giant.” —Kirkus
“Will China change the 21st century, or be changed by it? China Airborne describes a country ambitiously soaring to fantastic new heights even as its destination remains perilously uncertain. James Fallows reports elegantly on the puzzles and paradoxes of this massive nation and its quest for global prominence.” —Patrick Smith, author of Somebody Else’s Century
“James Fallows has found a brilliant metaphor for China, and he is uniquely qualified to unspool the tale. Based on years of firsthand experience on the ground in China—and in cockpits around the world—this book showcases his gifts for deep reporting and analysis. Fallows doesn't simply bear witness; he unravels and dissects. For this vast country to achieve a leading role in the aerospace industry, it must attain standards of innovation, efficiency and precision that would signal a new era in the rise of a superpower. Has it attained that level? There is no better writer to find the answer, and Fallows has done it.” —Evan Osnos, contributor to The New Yorker
“In China Airborne, Fallows tells the story of China’s efforts to become a global leader in aviation and aerospace, a story that reveals the economic and political tensions in contemporary China. China’s past economic success has been built on a combination of massive investment and labor force mobilization—what Fallows calls “hard” economic power and autocratic political control. But success in aerospace, like success in other industries that depend on innovation, requires what Fallows calls “soft” economic power—things like trust, honest and transparent regulation, coordination between civil, commercial and military organizations, and a culture of free research and exchange of ideas. Anyone interested China’s future economic, technological and political developments should read Fallows’ fascinating and insightful new book.” —Laura Tyson, Former Director of the National Economic Council and Chair of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Clinton Administration, professor and former dean of the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley
Praise for James Fallows
“Fallows is refreshingly aware. . . . A shrewd observer of human foibles and political quagmires with the eye for detail of an experienced journalist, he gives us panoramic views of China that are both absorbing and illuminating.” —Jonathan Spence, The New York Times Book Review
“Fallows represents the best of American journalism—honest, fearless, and hard-hitting. Moving easily among Chinese, from the ordinary to the high-ranking, he reports from China as an American observer, with the same questions and frustrations that most Americans feel but without either the prejudices of some or the ideological pixilation of others.” —Sidney Rittenberg, Sr., coauthor of The Man Who Stayed Behind
“Postcards from Tomorrow Square offers some wonderful snapshots of the contradictions of modern China. As always, Fallows writes from the front lines with insight and flair.” —Rob Gifford, author of China Road
“James Fallows’s insatiable curiosity and clear narrative make his China journey a real reward.” —John Sculley, former CEO of Apple Computer
About the Author
James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has reported from around the world and has worked in software design at Microsoft, as the editor of U.S. News & World Report, and as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. He is currently a news analyst for NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered and a visiting professor at the University of Sydney.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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 political 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.
Outsiders have learned to stretch their mental boundaries when it comes to considering China’s “scale” in one sense of that term: its billion-plus population, its numerous cities the size of Paris, its collective appetite for commodities and products of all sorts, its influence on the world’s markets and environment. The military analyst Thomas P. M. Barnett has come up with a vivid thought experiment to help outsiders envision the advantages and challenges that come from China’s huge human scope: The United States and China have about the same geographic area, although China’s mountainous and desert expanses mean that it has significantly less arable land. But China’s population is about four times larger than America’s. To match the challenge of human scale that confronts China, the United States would have to bring in every person from Mexico, more than 110 million in all, plus the 200 million people in Brazil. Then it would also need the entire population of Cuba and the rest of the Caribbean nations, plus Canada, Colombia, and every other country in North and South America. After doing all that, it would be up to around one billion people. If it then also added the entire population of Nigeria, some 155 million, and every person from the hyper--crowded islands of Japan, 125 million more, it would have as many people as China—almost.
Feeding, governing, housing, and employing these vast numbers within the borders of the existing fifty U.S. states would be an almost unimaginable challenge, especially while preserving anything resembling open space or wilderness. At the same time, all this humanity would mean that the resulting superstate could draw on much greater reserves of talent in every field—scientific, athletic, artistic and musical, entrepreneurial, civic. Think of running for President in these circumstances. Think of getting into Harvard (as many Chinese students now aspire to do). Those near-unimaginable strengths and the impossibilities of the situation are China’s reality now. They explain the aphorism that has stuck with me since I heard it from a government official in Shanghai in 2006. “Outsiders think of everything about China as multiplied by 1.3 billion,” he told me. “We have to think of everything as divided by 1.3 billion.” Scale in this sense, as an indicator of variety and contradiction, of occasional chaos and frequent difficulty of control, is at least as important as the sheer weight of China’s influence on the world.
I have met people for whom “China” is the export factories surrounding Hong Kong and Shenzhen; others for whom it is the Communist Party Schools and centers of related doctrine in Beijing. For many tens of millions in the countryside, “China” is nothing more than the area they can reach by foot from their farmhouses each day. When I spent several days at the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 with an Italian friend, we were often the only non-Chinese people within sight among the thousands in a given pavilion, public square, or multi-hour line for admission. The vast majority of other attendees were families from China’s second- and third-tier cities for whom a trip through the Saudi Arabian or German pavilion was as close as they were ever likely to come to a view of the outside world. Exhibits that seemed cheesy to sophisticates from Europe, Japan, or North America were much more popular with their target audiences of untraveled Chinese. In this way the Expo served the same function for early twenty-first century China as the St. Louis and Chicago world’s fairs had done for wide--eyed inland Americans a hundred years before.
On one of my first reporting trips to Guangdong province in southern China, a foreigner who had lived there for more than a decade and worked daily with Chinese factory owners and laborers said, “Each month I’m here, I know half as much as I did the month before.” I thought he was being arch, but a few years later I began to grasp what he was saying. It’s not that your store of knowledge keeps going down; it’s that your awareness of what you don’t know—and won’t ever know—keeps going up, and at a faster rate. It’s like driving away from the city lights at night and, when lifting your gaze, realizing with shock how many more stars are in the sky than you had previously seen, or imagined. It increases the importance of trying to recognize trends while allowing the possibility of change.
***
On the ground at Changsha
The trip began poorly. I had met Claeys in Changsha on a Friday evening, in plenty of time to make the three-hour flight to Zhuhai by Sunday night before the opening of the show on Monday. This is the way small-plane aviation is, anywhere in the world: “efficient” during the moments the plane is actually in the air and flying point to point, burdened with waits both planned and unplanned much of the rest of the time. Claeys had recently based the airplane in Changsha as part of a long-game strategy for attracting the interest of one of the likeliest-seeming purchasers in China. This was Zhang Yue, or “Chairman Zhang,” a stylish industrial entrepreneur then in his mid forties who had trained as a landscape painter in vocational school and then come up with a way to make energy--saving air conditioners for places with unreliable electric-power supplies—like rural China, India, and Pakistan. He succeeded so spectacularly that he had built a surreal company town-utopia on the outskirts of the big industrial city of Changsha, which had been Chairman Mao’s home in his student days and now has the biggest statue of Mao in the world (a hundred-foot-high granite bust).
Mr. Zhang’s Broad Town factory compound, named for the Broad Air Conditioning company he and his brother founded and that he still ran, is on a similarly grand scale. It features a building modeled on the main palace at Versailles, a heliport, a gold-colored steel-and-glass replica of the Great Pyramid of Egypt, and similar other touches around the factory and dormitories themselves. Mr. Zhang is an avid environmentalist—he said that Al Gore was his hero—and an aviation buff as well, and Claeys thought he would be a good candidate for one of China’s first Cirruses. He already had a small Broad Corporation air fleet consisting of a helicopter, a small jet, and several Cessna single-engine propeller planes, and he was always on the lookout for newer and, he hoped, more environmentally friendly forms of air travel.
Starting on Saturday morning, Claeys kept asking the Aviation Department at Broad if and when they might be able to find some fuel for the Cirrus, so it could fly on to Zhuhai. Piston-powered airplanes—most of the small ones with propellers—use a different sort of fuel from either jets or cars. They need a form of gasoline, rather than the kerosene used by jets (or by turbine-powered turboprops); and the gas must be a higher octane than automobile gas, with the lead additives that were banned in normal gasoline many years ago. Given China’s tiny fleet of piston planes, this aviation gasoline, or avgas, was not easy to come by. Hour after hour we heard that the fuel was “on its way” or “almost here.” For a while, it was supposed to be on a convoy from another province. Then we didn’t hear about a convoy anymore. But perhaps there was gas at a different part of the airport! Then again, apparently not. Saturday afternoon, when we had planned to leave, turned into Saturday evening, and then into pitch dark. It’s always easier and safer to fly during daylight, and since we had all of Sunday still ahead of us, we gave up and went to town, checked into the hotel we had previously checked out of, and decided to try again the next morning.
We got back to the airfield early. Against my own late-rising nature, I have come to respect the flying world’s emphasis on getting started as close as possible to first light. There are that many more hours of daylight to work with, and that much more leeway to wait out or plan around bad weather. If you’re worried about turbulence, wind, or thunderstorms, those problems are usually mildest early in the day. But Sunday morning passed, with no fuel. We were taken to the Broad Company’s huge employee cafeteria for lunch, where we sat among the hundreds of blue-uniformed workers and ate our rice and stir-fried pork with peppers off aluminum trays, with metal chopsticks. Back out to the airfield, where still no one knew about any gas. Claeys kept looking down at his watch and up at the sky. You never want to “have to” make a trip in a small plane, but he felt he had to get to Zhuhai by dawn. Two p.m. came and went. Three o’clock. Four. The November sun was getting low in the sky—though not as low as you would expect, given the season. Since the whole continental mass of China runs on Beijing Time, sunrise and sunset both come “late” in cities away from the east coast; it is as if everywhere from Boston to Seattle ran on East Coast time.
Five o’clock, still some remaining light—and the first sign of hope! A delivery truck rolled up toward our airplane, with a large metal barrel in the rear. “Avgas!” the head of the Aviation Department said, in Chinese. (“Hang kong qi you!”) Claeys asked him where it had come from. The story involved derelict ex-Soviet training planes that had been parked in a remote section of the airport. There was enough old gas left in their tanks to drain into the barrel. Claeys, who understood the description in Chinese (as I did not), blanched. A little later he let me know what they had said.
At most airports, fuel comes out by way of a motor-driven pump, like at a gas station. At a few of the most remote, you might use a hand-cranked system to drive fuel through the hose and into the airplane’s gas tank. In this case, we had the barrel on the truck bed, a gas tank opening on top of each wing of the plane, and a ten-foot-long, inch-wide plastic hose with which to connect them. A luckless member of the Broad Corporation’s Aviation Department team began sucking fuel through the hose to siphon it from the barrel into the wing tanks.
At first he dreamed that he could start a flow going without getting gasoline all over his tongue and teeth. But each time he tried, yanking the hose from his mouth just before the gasoline reached his lips and jerking the hose toward the plane, the gas retreated back down the hose as soon as he stopped sucking. Not liking it a bit, and to the laughter of his fellow team members, he faced the fact that he would have to suck the gas along until it was spewing into his mouth—and then hand the hose to one of us to stick in the tank, while he began spitting and wiping off his tongue with a cloth. The Chinese term chi ku, “eat bitterness,” is shorthand for being tough, doing what it takes, bearing hardship. I imagined that in Changsha they might someday say he you, “drink gas,” for the same concept.
An hour of this—the flow got slower and slower as the level in the barrel went down—with ever-darkening skies, and we were ready to go. In pilot school, you’re taught to be hyperconscious of the quality of the fuel going into the gas tank. After all, it is what will keep you in the air and alive. Claeys and I rationalized that if the fuel was bad enough—who knows how long it had been in those Soviet-airplane tanks, or where else it might have been—the engine wouldn’t start at all. And if it was good enough to get the plane through the engine start and the test runup, or trial revving of the propellers before takeoff, it would probably at least get us up to an altitude from which we could deploy the parachute if need be. This is not the way I had been taught to operate an airplane, and not what Claeys would have liked to do, but, I told myself, This is China. Meanwhile, Walter Wang was reading peacefully.
Into the plane; onto the runway; preparing for takeoff. Before the flight, Claeys had spent weeks getting the clearances he needed to operate a foreign-registered airplane, as a foreign citizen, through Chinese military airspace—which virtually all the airspace in China is. As we prepared for a southbound departure on the very long, military-scale runway, Claeys revved the engine repeatedly, to make sure that the gas was actually supporting combustion, and as a proxy for seeing that it would keep doing so once we took off.
The most dangerous time in a small-plane flight is the first thirty or forty seconds after the wheels leave the runway. If the engine fails then, because the fuel flow is obstructed or the engine hesitates when suddenly pushed to full power, you are in danger precisely because you’re so close to the ground. If the engine fails when an airplane is 10,000 feet up, that’s not good. But because airplanes are designed to glide down relatively slowly even without engine power, rather than plummeting like a rock, the higher an airplane is when the trouble starts, the more time the pilot has to decide what to do, and the wider the range of territory and possible landing sites the plane could reach in a glide. Even with its parachute, the Cirrus is in trouble if an engine fails before it gets at least 400 feet above the ground—there is just not enough time for the parachute to deploy fully and slow the descent. So Claeys tested and retested the engine; I kept my eye on the parachute handle, to use if we got far enough into the air; Walter Wang settled into the backseat, and we went to the end of the runway to take off.
The engine came up smoothly; the plane reached an air speed of 70 knots, at which point Claeys began easing its nose upward; at about the same time as we got a safe distance off the runway, we disappeared into the brown blear of the standard big-city Chinese pollution shroud. And we were off.
***
Into the clouds
In flying, the big distinction is in the clouds versus out of the clouds. When out of the clouds, you can see where you’re going and steer the plane as if it were a car—with the added ability to go up and down. When you’re in the clouds, everything about controlling the plane is different. It’s like driving a car while blindfolded, but worse. Assuming he’s not near a cliff, even a blindfolded driver can keep a car securely on the ground. In a plane it’s simply impossible to tell up from down by your own bodily senses, if you can’t see the ground or the horizon to assess whether the plane is turning, climbing, or holding a straight-and-level course. This is the hardest aspect of aeronautics to believe unless you have tried it. You control the plane by obsessively “scanning” the dashboard gauges, constantly comparing readings from one with the others, and taking advantage of their gyroscopes, which give an idea of where the horizon would be if you were able to see it.
Because of the clouds, and because it was night, and because it’s not possible in China just to fly around without the government’s approval as it is in much of the United States, from takeoff onward we were already operating under instrument flight rules, following controllers’ instructions about when to climb, which direction to turn, and what waypoints to cross on our way south. This should have been fine, but it soon became more complicated than we had foreseen. Around the world, air-traffic controllers are supposed to be able to talk with pilots in English, in addition to their local language. If you listen to controllers’ discussions on the radio, you will hear a mixture of Spanish and English in Mexico, Korean and English in Korea, French and English in France, and an improbable English-only discourse most of the time in Japan, even though most of those speaking are clearly Japanese. (I ascribe this to a greater emphasis on doing things the “right” way in Japan than in many other places.) When traveling on an airline that lets passengers listen to air-traffic control, I would hear, at China’s main international airports—Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou—controllers talking rapid Mandarin to Chinese pilots and careful, accented, but clear English to Germans, Japanese, Americans, Turks, and other outsiders. But here in the interior of China, there would be no reason for controllers to keep up that competency. Claeys, skilled in Chinese, felt for procedure’s sake that as a foreign pilot he should speak English over the airwaves. But every exchange was halting—and I began to think that the controllers just wanted to forget that we were there.
Between Changsha and Zhuhai stood the mountains of southern Hunan. They are not tremendously high by world standards, but they were higher than our airplane was at its initial assigned altitude. And unless the controller gave us instructions to climb—as we would routinely expect a few minutes into the flight—we would be headed for trouble soon. Even for airliners, instrument flights usually take place in stages: first up to 3,000 feet, then 5,000 feet, then for the airliners well up into the “flight levels,” usually above 30,000 feet. Airliners fly that high precisely because the air is so thin. Within limits, the higher it goes, the less wind resistance, or drag, an airplane has to force itself through, so the better fuel mileage it gets. It looked as if we needed to get to about 10,000 feet to go safely over the mountains—that was our guess from the charts, which themselves were in principle a military secret in China—but the controllers hadn’t told us to climb, and we couldn’t get their attention to pass along our increasingly urgent request.
On the GPS--based moving map in the cockpit, we saw the ridge draw closer. We couldn’t legally turn around, since that would be deviating from our clearance. Nor—again without breaking rules—could we decide to climb on our own. If we kept on straight and level, within ten minutes we’d crash. Then within eight minutes. Then six. Of course, we wouldn’t just keep on flying straight into the mountains. Around the world, pilots always have the option to “declare an emergency” and deviate from their assigned course and do whatever else they must to avoid disaster. But that is asking for trouble, even in places where flight is less carefully restricted than it is in China. I learned later that a military jet was trailing us through the flight. What might it have done if we suddenly made an unauthorized move? I was preparing a pitch to Claeys on the lines of: I know that as foreigners we are “supposed” to be speaking English to the controller, but you can speak perfectly good Chinese! Time to switch? Please?
All the chatter between pilots and controllers, anywhere in the world, is over open radio channels, as with truckers’ old CBs. The other pilots on the frequency, apparently all of them from airlines, could hear our increasingly tense-sounding attempts to get the controllers’ attention. Finally a Japan Airlines pilot who was capable in both English and Chinese (apart, I assume, from Japanese) broke in to ask us, in English, if we would like some help. He then relayed the request, in Chinese, to the controller. Immediately the controller responded to him—partly because of the language but much more, I suspect, because talking with airline pilots seemed “normal”; we could well have been the first private pilots ever to come through his sector. The JAL pilot passed the word back to us, though we had heard it over the airwaves too. Permission to climb. One hurdle cleared.
On through the dark and clouds toward Zhuhai. Its airport is one of a large number studding the bay around Hong Kong harbor. Geographically, the closest U.S. equivalent would be the coast of Maine or Alaska, with rocky cliffs rising sharply from the bay. Economically and commercially, the equivalent would be the greater Los Angeles basin, with roads, lights, and buildings sprawling as far in all directions as one could see. As we descended (with controllers’ permission—they were more comfortable in English here so much closer to Hong Kong) in preparation for landing, we were mainly out of the clouds while still 2,000 feet above the ground. We marveled at the lights of the industrial urban expanse while noting the large, unlit masses that signified mountains and rocky islands. Zhuhai’s airport is on the far southern extension of a peninsula, the southernmost point in the Hong Kong area. The instrument approach required circling the hills and island peaks, which is safe enough as long as you can follow the radio-guidance beam all the way down to the airport.
As we came to the coast, the clouds thickened again, and we found ourselves in the middle of them when only 1,000 feet above the ground. Claeys had his eyes glued to the dials that showed how closely we were following the beam. If we drifted “one dot left” relative to the beam, he would nudge the plane toward the right; if we fell “one dot low” beneath the desired glide path, he would edge the plane up. I looked back and forth from those gauges to the window, waiting for the glimpse of the ground or the airport approach lights that we needed before we reached our “decision height” a few hundred feet above the runway.
Suddenly the beam we were following, for an Instrument Landing System approach (or ILS, the most accurate system then in common use) seemed to behave strangely, and even flicker off. Momentarily there was no path to follow. This required immediate attention. We were close to the ground; we were headed down; we were among rocky peaks higher than our airplane was; and because of clouds and the dark we couldn’t see what was ahead.
With the rational parts of our brains, we knew—and had discussed during the preceding few minutes, in the “brief the approach” discussion that is supposed to be part of the preparation for every landing—how we should respond. Airplane life is based on backups and contingencies, and every pilot who has trained for an instrument rating has practiced the “missed approach” routine that is called for if you don’t see the ground or runway lights when you descend as low as the approach-chart says you safely and legally can. But it is one thing to know that in theory, and to have done it in practice time and again. It is something else to have to decide in real time while knowing that we were lower than the surrounding hills and only a few seconds’ flight time away from the hyper-busy airspace for Hong Kong.
The main backup plan in any situation like this is to climb immediately, since you cannot keep heading down when you don’t know what you might hit. If we climbed too much too suddenly, that could mean violating our clearance, and would bring us up into airspace where five large commercial airports had airline and air-cargo traffic merging—Hong Kong, Macau, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Zhuhai—with God knows what consequences. Of course we’d climb nonetheless; as the aviation saying went, it’s better to be around to argue about possible violations than to miss that disciplinary hearing because you have crashed. We could worry later on, too, about what had gone wrong. Had the landing signal failed or been switched off for some reason? Was it our instruments or their settings?
Claeys and I had begun talking, tersely, about what to do next when, with the relief of a drowning person who breaks the surface to gasp air, I saw out the window that we had left the ragged bottom layer of the clouds and could see all the way to the vast, open, clearly lit main runway at Zhuhai.
We landed. The humid 90-degree air fogged over glasses, camera lenses, and dial faces the second we opened the cockpit door. We had friends take a picture, with smiles that barely masked the tenseness we had felt.
We got out, both sobered and giddy; we went to a nightclub in downtown Zhuhai that was called the Blue Angel and was owned by China’s most famous female pilot, Chen Yan, a glamorous bombshell who was frequently on the cover of fashion magazines and who asked me, when I first met her in the presence of her teenaged son, “Do you think I am his mother? Most people think I am his sister!” Over the next few days Peter Claeys was busy at the air show; I stayed the next day and then took a commercial flight back to Shanghai, and we never fully determined what had happened in those seconds that seemed like centuries inside the cockpit. Had there been a power failure, or a disruption in the navigation signal, as sometimes happens? Had we gotten a setting wrong? Had someone at the airport inexplicably decided it was time to shut down? At the time I had been too busy staring for breaks in the clouds to notice all the variables, and afterward there was no way to be sure. We saw the runway in time and got down—and if we hadn’t seen it, we had been prepared to divert somewhere else.
I did not fly as a pilot or copilot again in mainland Chinese airspace. But starting that day, parallel to my day job of reporting on financiers and politicians, I followed the people in China who were trying to remake its history through taking to the air.
Product details
- ASIN : B005QPIA2Y
- Publisher : Vintage (May 15, 2012)
- Publication date : May 15, 2012
- Language : English
- File size : 1000 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 265 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #760,095 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #229 in History of Astronomy
- #422 in History of China
- #458 in Aviation (Kindle Store)
- Customer Reviews:
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Customers find the book provides an insightful look into China's aspirations and unique culture. They describe it as a thrilling and enjoyable read with great writing quality. Readers appreciate the author's clear understanding of what makes China unique and interesting. The book provides a good overview of modern China through the lens of the author's experiences. However, opinions differ on the pacing - some find it consistent and good, while others feel underwhelmed or disappointed.
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Customers find the book provides a clear understanding of China's unique culture and aspirations. They find it an interesting read for anyone interested in China and its aviation industry. The author provides a timely look at business in China and explores contemporary Chinese society from many angles.
"...The breadth of his knowledge is sweeping and I closed the book rather amazed at all I had learned about what it takes to manage international flight..." Read more
"...a world leader in aircraft and aerospace manufacturing and expertise is simply incredible!..." Read more
"...revealing many of the personalities that have been instrumental in China's aviation ascendancy...." Read more
"James Fallows is an excellent journalist with a very open-minded understanding of China...." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and entertaining. They describe it as an interesting and insightful account of China's entry into aircraft. Readers also mention that the story transcends its ostensible subject.
"...indifferent (if not downright hostile) and turn it into a story of suspense and adventure, human and technological, and to delight me with every page..." Read more
"...A thrilling read, indeed." Read more
"...a metaphor for China's leap forward into the 21st century - a story full of optimism, cunning, technological marvels, financial triumphs,..." Read more
"...An entertaining & highly insightful look inside the complex, huge & fascinating nation...." Read more
Customers find the book's writing quality good. They appreciate the author's insights and articulation of his experiences while traveling in China. The book is described as readable and engaging, with an interesting narrative.
"...It is about so much more than I can say here. It's worth reading just for Fallows' description of how he and his wife were bullied by plainclothes..." Read more
"Mr.Fallows does a great job of articulating his experiences while abroad in China and using the challenges faced by the aerospace industry in that..." Read more
"An erudite and readable writer creates a short and enjoyable look at modern China through the lens of its attempts to create a modern air travel..." Read more
"...then China, as Fallows explains in this clearly observed and written book, will have an extremely difficult time emulating America's success...." Read more
Customers find the book provides an insightful and entertaining look at modern China. They find it illuminating and entertaining.
"An erudite and readable writer creates a short and enjoyable look at modern China through the lens of its attempts to create a modern air travel..." Read more
"...It isn't a tourist review, and you'll get a good look at the good, bad, and ugly side of China...." Read more
"...An entertaining & highly insightful look inside the complex, huge & fascinating nation...." Read more
"I read this before my recent trip to China and found it very illuminating...." Read more
Customers have mixed opinions about the pacing of the book. Some find it good, providing real on-the-ground intel on China's aviation industry. Others feel disappointed, underwhelmed, and repetitive at times.
"...progress has been and how its authoritarian system has, so far, worked well enough that most people in China would say their lives are better off..." Read more
"...book has so much promise, but in the end I was very disappointed an underwhelmed...." Read more
"...This book reveals with first hand accounts the tale of two cities that is china through the lens of an aviation enthusiast...." Read more
"...I did not know he was a pilot until I read this book. He does what he does consistently...." Read more
Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2012Let me admit it up front: Few topics could bore me as much as avionics and the aerospace industry. I only want to know that my pilot can take off, get me to where I want to go and land the plane safely. I don't really know the difference between the words "avionics" and "aerospace." So I approached China Airborne with a touch of trepidation: How could I possibly enjoy a book about a topic I find dryer than dust?
Leave it to James Fallows to take a subject to which I am indifferent (if not downright hostile) and turn it into a story of suspense and adventure, human and technological, and to delight me with every page. Yes, China Airborne is about aviation in China, how it started, how it has evolved and where it's heading, yet the book transcends its ostensible subject, which Fallows uses as a metaphor for China's evolution in general, for its advancement into the modern era, and all the challenges it faces as it seeks to break away from its role as the maker of goods designed by others to a nation that actually pioneers new technologies.
Before the 1990s China's aviation industry lagged drastically behind that of the developed world, to say the least. Most of the planes were Russian made, the airports were primitive and few, and its safety record atrocious. Now China is home to some of the world's most impressive airports, its aviation industry is growing at breakneck speed with billions of dollars in government funding, and it boasts one of the highest air safety records in the world.
How China got here is a breathtaking story, a story of China's famous "can-do" attitude and willingness to throw itself into the projects it sets its sights on. An important part of this story and one the Chinese are less likely to talk about is the role of US entities, especially companies like Boeing and engineers and contractors from US agencies, which guided China along the way over the decades. Fallows charts China's progress during these years and introduces us to the cast of characters who possessed the vision, the skills and the sheer bravura to move China's aviation industry into the modern age.
Fallows' description of the proposed development of an avionics research center in a remote area outside of Xi'An immediately brought to mind a chapter in <a href="[...]>Peter Hessler's Country Driving</a>, where he describes the building of a factory in China that plans to manufacture the little metal rings that hold brassieres together. They have no customers, no plans for sales or marketing, no business infrastructure, yet they pour money into building the factory, get it going into full swing and hire a complete staff. Eventually, after several months, they begin to get customers. Build it, and they will come. The same, it seems, with this aviation center and its grandiose plans to transform the region to attract tourists and become China's center for aviation research.
Fallows describes how projects like these begin at the local level in China, the first step being winning the blessing of local officials and convincing them of the financial rewards to their region. A lot of guanxi is expended along the way. The dreamers will worry about getting the central government involved later. The avionics center project was immense, and Fallows' descriptions of the building of runways in what was essentially the wilderness are amusing but also so quintessentially Chinese -- we can do this, and we can do it on a grand scale! The obstacles they face -- and there will be many -- can be dealt with later.
A pilot himself (the book begins with his preparation to co-pilot the first Cirrus plane in China), Fallows obviously loves this topic. The breadth of his knowledge is sweeping and I closed the book rather amazed at all I had learned about what it takes to manage international flight, how today's jets are built, how new GPS systems are changing how pilots take off and land and making it possible to put up runways even in remote rugged mountain terrain in Tibet. As I started the book I didn't really <em>want</em> to know about these things, but I was quickly engrossed.
To a large extent this book is about China's efforts to adapt to an age when leading an industry means opening up your people's minds to new ideas, to new ways of thinking, to sharing knowledge and information. The last quarter of the book is less about flight and more about the Chinese government's conflicting interests, ones we've discussed so many times here: retaining control and directing people's thoughts vs. opening up and encouraging talent to blossom. If China wants to be on the frontier of the aerospace industry it needs to draw talent from all over the world. It will have to loosen the military's grip on who controls the skies so the industry can operate without ridiculous and irrational restrictions.
Fallows makes the point more than once that China has the hardware, the money and the facilities but, he writes, "it lacks 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 attract talent from around the world. If China can succeed fully in aerospace, then in principle there is very little it cannot do."
Fallows doesn't pretend to be a prophet and he leaves this question open. But he is clear about one thing: without the requirements he lists, without greater rule of law and respect for contracts, without protection of intellectual property, China will surely fail to meet its objective. It will not lead the world in technology and innovation. The book is all about China's dreamers and their dreams. It would be such a pity to see China's inflexibility and insecurities hold its people's dreams back.
Boeing and Airbus see China as its most promising market and have agreed to joint ventures that involve the sharing of technology, despite the risks, because they know this is where the customers of the future are. China will play a huge role in the assembly of today's incredibly complex jetliners, just as it does with iPhones. It will be buying more aircraft than any other nation. But can China design the next jetliner or iPhone?
It cannot, Fallows argues, unless it embraces "the openness and experimentation that world leadership in fields like aerospace would demand." China now shields its people, protects them from "harmful content" on the Internet, which Fallows says makes many Chinese feel "infantilized and diminished by this reminder that they're not quite part of the modern world." China has to deal, too, with its paranoia and prickly sensitivities, its inability to deflect incidents like Liu Xiaobo's winning the Nobel Peace Prize instead of being thrown off balance and revealing its insecurities to the world. There's a lot about China's thirst for soft power, and how it always gets put onto the back burner behind China's No. 1 priority, internal stability and complete power of the party.
I bookmarked so many passages in this wonderful book, and I can't go into every aspect of it that I enjoyed. It is about so much more than I can say here. It's worth reading just for Fallows' description of how he and his wife were bullied by plainclothes police at Tiananmen Square on the 20-year anniversary of the June 4th crackdown (an incident he blogged about at the time).
You come away from this book so impressed with what China has done and can do, with just how extraordinary its progress has been and how its authoritarian system has, so far, worked well enough that most people in China would say their lives are better off today than they were twenty or thirty years ago. But you also come away with strong doubts about China's ability to rise to the next stage of power, where its people's creativity and imaginations are unleashed, and where universal laws are respected. Where China becomes a true global citizen, concerned not so much with the specialness of China but with China's role as a world leader. (This discussion of how China fosters the notion of its own uniqueness, with 5,000 years of history, as opposed to its place within the world community as a nation that cares -- or at least pretends to care -- about other nations aside from itself is one of the most fascinating in the book.)
I strongly recommend this book to anyone seeking to understand China and its place in the 21st century. Fallows' accumulated wisdom of living in China, starting with his first visit there in 1986, pervades every page, and you will be thinking about where China is heading for a long time after you put it down.
- Reviewed in the United States on March 5, 2013Mr.Fallows does a great job of articulating his experiences while abroad in China and using the challenges faced by the aerospace industry in that country to highlight what it may take to bring China fully to world prominence and perhaps even pre-eminence. While in China I have felt that this is what it must have seemed like in the US at the turn of the 20th century. What is occurring is exciting but there is a feeling of discomfort and uncertainty just below the surface. Mr. Fallows captures this and the question of whether China has the resolve and vision to make the 21st century the "Chinese Century".
- Reviewed in the United States on November 28, 2012You might assume that attempting to get the current Chinese leadership to allow private ownership of small planes and helicopters to utilize Chinese airspace to be no big deal. But given that unlike most of the nations of the industrialized world - China has no general (private) aviation and until recently - had few airports and runways, trained pilots, very few flight controllers, aircraft fuel supplies, aircraft service centers or trainers to teach pilots or train expert mechanics to service aircraft. Well - things are about to change and change radically and rapidly: Like everything else in China's lightening-fast pace of playing catch-up with the rest of the world - Jame's Fallow's account of how today's China plans on becoming a world leader in aircraft and aerospace manufacturing and expertise is simply incredible! And the cost to China and the world in terms of the associated pollution associated with such a massive expansion of air travel, construction of hundreds of new airports, and aircraft manufacturing is not without a terrible potential toll. James Fallows tells this story as if it were an adventure novel - and in doing so sheds more light on the mysteries and wonders of the largest populated nation on the planet and how its secretive government plans to take-over this industry in a relatively short time - and what consequences are in store for all while that happens. A thrilling read, indeed.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 5, 2014Piecing together the conundrum that is china is extremely difficult for those that have not spent much time in china. This book reveals with first hand accounts the tale of two cities that is china through the lens of an aviation enthusiast.
It considers many of the aspects required for china to ascend to a first class aviation designer and builder. But, places many of the requirements in the light of the author's experiences and the manner in which china operates today from both a government perspective but also a historical perspective providing context for the reader to assess the probabilities of success for china in this massive endeavor.
I found this book very helpful in filling in the pieces I needed to gain a better understanding of the current state of China's aviation industry. It also does a good job of revealing many of the personalities that have been instrumental in China's aviation ascendancy. The reason I gave this book five stars is that it does not come to any conclusions. It merely provides perspectives and context for the reader to come to his/her own opinion.
Top reviews from other countries
- B.T.M. vd Laan/T.D. BakkerReviewed in the United Kingdom on December 20, 2015
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Very good book on recent aviation history
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Gabriele RossiReviewed in Italy on February 9, 2013
5.0 out of 5 stars Libro "laterale" sullo sviluppo dell'economia cinese
Affronta il tema dello sviluppo in Cina parlando della crescita dell'industria aeronautica e del turismo.
Differente dalla maggioranza dei libri sulla Cina moderna, molte informazioni interessanti non si trovano in altri libri.
L'autore e' un famoso giornalista dell'Atlantic e pilota di piccoli aerei.
***letto in kindle***
- TKRReviewed in Canada on September 9, 2012
5.0 out of 5 stars Insider expertise from outside....
Building a successful commercial aircraft may seem a routine job these days; after all, Boeing and Airbus - and Bombardier and Embraer in modest measures - have done it so many times! But not so, certainly not by an emerging economy, a fact easily overlooked by many western observers, particularly those impressed by the brilliant achievements of China in many areas of manufacturing and over-awed by China's readiness to pump literally billions of dollars into their latest large aircraft venture. James Fallows's book 'China Airborne' offers the readers a rare combination of panoramic views of China's fragmented but seemingly homogenious power structure as well as close-up views of how a successful commercial aircraft is designed and built. The author takes an inventory of the various ways in which the west, particularly America, has helped China achieve a remarkable measure of safety in their skies within the last two decades, and at the same time questions the policies of the present government which does not seem to understand what is needed for success in commercial aircraft industry. Good airlplane design is a combination of myriad number of sciences and needs to be mastered little by little, much like playing a symphony, which cannot be achieved overnight through money or power. The author makes the case that the lack of openness will only hamper the process of honest interaction both within Chinese society and with other advanced countries. This is an amazingly well-written book, remarkable for the author's keen insight into what goes into the makings of safe and successful aviation and the rarely understood link with the structure of a society. A `must-read' for all China-watchers, particularly those preoccupied with China's 'challenge' of the duopoly of Boeing and Airbus...
- Alexander RileyReviewed in the United Kingdom on May 17, 2022
4.0 out of 5 stars China in One Industry
Fascinating book by a journalist who clearly is deeply knowledgeable about China. However, since this was written a while ago and China moves fast, the work is now a little out of date.
This is not necessarily a bad thing; it's interesting to see which of Fallow's predictions have come about and which haven't. In particular, contrary to his assessment, China does seem to have become an "innovation nation", and his predictions about the devestating effects that shutting american big tech out from behind the great firewall of China haven't aged well at all. In fact this has had the Listian or Hamiltonian effect of nuturing a giant, super-competitive native Chinese tech industry, with companies like Baidu rising up to fill the spot that Google would have made for itself in the Chinese market. If anything China seems to have been too succesful on this front, if the sudden crackdowns on Chinese big tech are anything to go by it seems the CCP are worried they've created a creature that's beyond their ability to control.
But more relevantly, Fallows seems to have remained right on the money about the aerospace industry; just in the last month China had another major airline crash. In the book, Fallows claims that creating a viable aerospace industry and associated regulatory apparatus needed to maintain it is in many ways a greater challenge than getting a man on the moon. The question is... can China do it?
- Ron CrooksReviewed in Canada on October 28, 2012
5.0 out of 5 stars Can China move to the next level or will it be doomed to supply cheap manpower for inventions made elsewhere?
A great read! This books gives numerous insights into the complex workings of the Chinese economy and political structure, highlighting the many potential problems created by a political culture that limits the free exchange of ideas.
The author presents a compressive look at the many facets of what is working well in China and where the endemic political corruption and state intervention in the economy may limit China's ability to move to a higher level of economic production and success.
The stated goal of the Chinese government is to create a modern aircraft manufacturing industry with a national expenditure of $250,000,000. Their focus is to build up of economic zones of aeronautical expertise. This may not in fact be enough to create a successful model that will compete with Boeing and Airbus and their emerging rivals Embraer and Bombardier.
With the author's experience in China and his understanding of what it takes to organize the development of a modern commercial airliner, this book affords the reader with the knowledge of this major industrial initiative and the obstacles China potentially faces if it doesn't move to a more open political and economic model.China Airborne