China Airborne

211 Pages·2013·1.15 MB·English

by  James Fallows

Copyright © 2012 by James Fallows
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random
House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.
Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fallows, James M.
China airborne / James Fallows.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-30790740-0
1. Aeronautics—China 2. Aeronautics, Commercial—China. 3. Aerospace industries—China. 4.
China—Economic conditions—2000– I. Title.
TL527.C5F35 2012 387.70951—dc23 2011046805
www.pantheonbooks.com
Jacket image from a painting by Yu Zhenli, May 1976. (altered detail).
Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund
v3.1
For Lincoln Caplan and Eric Redman
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. This Is Going to Be Big
2. Getting Off the Ground
3. The Men from Boeing
4. The Chinese Master Plan
5. An Airport in the Wilderness
6. An American Dream, Turned Chinese
7. China’s Own Boeing
8. The Environmental Consequences of Aviation
9. The Tensions Inside China
10. The Chinese Model, Airborne
Notes
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Acknowledgments
This book is dedicated with gratitude to Lincoln Caplan and Eric
Redman, friends and advisers through most of my life, who during the
evolution of this book have once again been generous and perceptive
sources of the right mixture of criticism, support, humor, and
inspiration. I am fortunate to have them as friends and to know I can
rely on them, as I have done very often over the years.
The Atlantic has been my professional home since the late 1970s;
through that time I have grown only more appreciative of its journalistic
values and its internal culture. David Bradley and Justin Smith have
made one of America’s oldest literary institutions into a viable modern
business. James Bennet and Scott Stossel have guided it (and me)
editorially, and were generous in letting me take time to work on this
book during an already short-staffed period for the magazine. Before
them I worked closely with a sequence of wonderful Atlantic editors:
Robert Manning, William Whitworth, Michael Kelly, and Cullen Murphy.
In recent years I have worked directly with Corby Kummer, Sue Parilla,
Marge duMond, and Janice Cane on most of my articles for the
magazine, including during my years in China, and with Bob Cohn and
John Gould for items on the Atlantic’s web site. As with previous books, I
really should list every name on the magazine’s masthead, but I will
mention those I worked with most often during the time I was in China:
Nicole Allan, Marc Ambinder, Lindsey Bahr, Jennifer Barnett, Ashley
Bolding, Ben Bradley, Lucy Byrd, Ben Carlson, Steve Clemons, Cotton
Codinha, Abby Cutler, Stacey Pavesi-Debre, Betsy Ebersole, Geoffrey
Gagnon, James Gibney, Jeffrey Goldberg, Chris Good, Bruce Gottlieb,
John Gould, Joshua Green, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, Alisha Hathawa,
Carl Holscher, Shana Keefe, Elizabeth Keffer, Aaron Kenner, Jay Lauf,
Clair Lorell, Alexis Madrigal, Megan McGuinn, Justin Miller, Chris Orr,
Don Peck, Lyndsay Polloway, Michael Proffitt, Natalie Raabe, Yvonne
Rolzhausen, Emmy Scandling, Suzanne Smalley, Ellie Smith, Maria
Streshinksy, John Fox Sullivan, Derek Thompson, Jason Treat, and
Robert Vare.
Since its founding in 2008, the United States Studies Centre at the
University of Sydney has been an additional, welcome professional
home. I thank Geoffrey Garrett for building and leading the Centre and
making me a part of it; his colleagues Sean Gallagher, Nina Fudala, Craig
Purcell, Will Turner, Amber D’Souza, and others; and Joe Skrzynski for
his hospitality in Sydney. My other long-term unofficial journalistic
home has been National Public Radio, and in particular I thank Guy Raz,
Phil Harrell, Matthew Martinez, Rick Holter, Daniel Shukhin, and others
with whom I have enjoyed working on the Weekend All Things Considered
program.
Wendy Weil, my literary agent for more than thirty years, represented
me with skill, toughness, understanding, and tact on this project as she
has on seven previous ones. At Pantheon, my publisher for most of the
past twenty years, I am grateful for the insight and guidance of my
editor, Dan Frank, who originally had the idea for this book and saw it
through several stages of evolution, and for the patience, flexibility, and
help of Jill Verrillo, Altie Karper, and Josie Kals.
I have been fascinated by and involved with Cirrus aircraft since the
late 1990s, when I first wrote about the start-up Cirrus Design company
for The New York Times Magazine. Soon thereafter I bought a Cirrus SR20
and flew it frequently around America and Canada, before selling it
when I moved to China in 2006. This book describes the important roles
played in China by first Peter Claeys and then Paul Fiduccia of Cirrus. I
am grateful to both of them for their time and trust. Also I thank Ian
Bentley, Gary Black, Scott Jiang, and Gary Poelma, now of Cirrus. Plus,
in other roles in aviation, Alan Klapmeier, Kate Dougherty, Bruce
Holmes, and Lane Wallace; and Michael Klein, Boni Caldeira, and Steve
Musgrove of Open Air, with whose guidance I have bought and happily
flown a used Cirrus SR22. For this book I should also acknowledge my
original flight instructors, Ken Michaelson and Chris Baker. Everyone
who follows aviation has learned from the insights of Richard Aboulafia,
of the Teal Group. I am grateful for all the time he spent helping me
clarify the arguments in this book.
In and around China, for friendship, advice, and help of different sorts
between 2006 and 2012, I would like to thank: Andy Andreasen, Fr. Ron
Anton, Phil Baker, Andrew Batson, Bing and Daniel Bell, Dominic
Barton, Richard Burger, Liam Casey, Liz Rawlings and Steve Chalupsky,
Francis Chao, Dovar Chen, Patrick Chovanec, Ella Chou, Chen Xin,
Duncan Clark, Melanie and Eliot Cutler, Simon Elegant, Pamela Leonard
and John Flower, Rebecca Frankel and Mike, Julio Friedmann, Gao
Yuanyang, Jeremy Goldkorn, Jim Gradoville, Paola Sada and Jorge
Guajardo, York-chi and Stephen Harder, Guo Liang, Hu Shuli, Andrew
Houghton, Andrew Hutson, Ann and Ken Jarrett, Jeremiah Jenne, Isaac
Kardon, Kent Kedl, Elizabeth Knup, Kaiser Kuo, Showkee Lee and her
family, Kai-fu Lee, Yumin Liang, Mei Fong and Andrew Lih, Rebecca and
Kenny Lin, Jeanee and Brian Linden, Barbara and Robert Liotta, River
Lu, Damien Ma, Jim McGregor, Kirk McDonald, Adam Minter, Russell
Leigh Moses, John Northen, Evan Osnos, Herve Pauze and Lisa Robins,
Minxin Pei, Michael Pettis, Fr. Roberto Ribeiro, Sidney Rittenberg, Robin
Bordie and Andy Rothman, Bob Schapiro, Rita O’Connor and Ted Schell,
Baifang and Orville Schell, Shi Hongshen, Sam Popkin and Susan Shirk,
Anne-Marie Slaughter and Andrew Moravcsik, Sherry Smith and Marcus
Corley, Nina Ni and Sun Tze, Andy Switky, Shane Tedjarati, Joe
Tymczyszyn, Michele Travierso, Ping Wang, Sean Wang, Louis Woo,
Candice and Jarrett Wrisley, Jenny and Bill Wright, Kevin Wu, Michael
Zakkour, and Dan Guttman and ZeeZee Zhong.
During a ten-week period early in 2010, I turned my part of the
Atlantic’s Web site over to teams of guest bloggers while I was finishing a
draft of this book. For their excellent work I am grateful to them all. For
the record, the full list, including a number of people already mentioned,
is: David Allen, Phil Baker, Mark Bernstein, Eric Bonabeau, Keith Blount,
Don Brown, Liam Casey, Ella Chou, Parker Donham, Kate Dougherty,
Xujun Eberlein, Lizzy Bennett Fallows, Deborah Fallows, Eamonn
Fingleton, Julian Fisher, Julio Friedmann, Piero Garau, Brian Glucroft,
Edward Goldstick, Sriram Gollapalli, Paola and Jorge Guajardo, Glenna
Hall, Shelley Hayduk, Bruce Holmes, Jeremiah Jenne, Alan Klapmeier,
Christina Larson, Damien Ma, Adam Minter, Grace Peng, Lucia Pierce,
Guy Raz, Sam Roggeveen, David Ryan, Sanjay Saigal, Kate Sedgwick,
Chuck Spinney, Andrew Sprung, John Tierney, Kentaro Toyama, Michele
Travierso, and Lane Wallace.
As for technology: This book was written using Literature & Latte’s
wonderful Scrivener writing software. I relied on the different and
complementary strengths of the programs DEVON-think Pro, Zoot,
PersonalBrain, and TinderBox for storing, organizing, and retrieving
research data.
Our extended family—our son Tom and his wife, Lizzy, our son Tad
and his, wife, Annie, and their new son, Jack—was of course a source of
joy and support to my wife and me during the years in which I reported
and then wrote this book. My wife, Deborah Fallows, is the key to
everything I have done.
Washington, D.C.
January 2012
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