highlights from china airborne

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 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.
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.
“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.”
Chinese military airspace—which virtually all the airspace in China is.
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.
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.
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.
Chinese law requires that images of Chinese cities from Google Maps, Google Earth, and the like must be offset from online street maps, so you can never exactly line up a street address with a satellite image.
I would hear the phrase “my dream is …” more often in the course of a typical month in China than in a typical decade in the United States.
Of course, by 2010, Chinese companies produced more cars, and Chinese customers bought more—including luxury models—than their counterparts in the United States. At that point General Motors was surviving not simply because of government help in the United States but also because of its strong position in China,
Chinese cities have plenty of street-level noise, to put it mildly, but as soon as you think to notice it, you’re struck by the lack of the overhead roar from airliners and helicopters that is the background soundscape in most of the world’s other big cities.
The city of Xi’an alone has more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, about eight times as many as in the comparable U.S. aviation center, Seattle.
The biggest difference between being a foreigner inside China and watching it as a foreigner from outside is how much more precarious and uneven the state of China’s “success” seems from within, and the different view one gets as to how China’s growth will affect the rest of the world.
Perhaps the strongest and most important of these general trends in China is the sense that things are possible.
At the national level, keeping air travel safe enough to seem First World rather than Third World is the most complex undertaking of all. It requires uniform maintenance and safety standards for airports in every remote corner of the country; a network of air-traffic controllers who know how to work within their own system and with the airlines’ pilots and dispatchers; the ability to collect accurate weather reports from around the country, and get them to pilots and controllers in real time, while feeding the data into supercomputers to forecast hazardous patterns; a system for training pilots, mechanics, and inspectors and indoctrinating them into a safety-first culture; check-and-balance procedures that detect and correct those not fully indoctrinated and that keep any individual or organization from taking too many risks; and more.
If China can succeed fully in aerospace, then in principle there is very little it cannot do.
At an even more basic and potentially embarrassing level, how was Kissinger supposed to get from the airplane onto the ground? When the 707’s doors opened, they would be some twenty feet above the runway, and at a different height from the Soviet-made planes. Would the VIP passengers have to jump, or climb, to reach the movable stairways the Beijing authorities already had on hand? According to my friend from the PLA Air Force, the Chinese officials did not want to buy or borrow a standard airport staircase from a Western supplier—such was their sensitivity about revelations of their technological isolation. Instead they built their own in a rush, using pictures and published specs of the 707. When Kissinger’s plane arrived they rolled out the staircase as if it were the most natural thing for them to be prepared for any sort of international aircraft.
Kissinger’s trip underscored China’s apartness from the world; Hu Jintao’s its thorough connectedness. And one of the few elements that remained constant through this forty-year span—that officials of each government traveled to the other’s capital on U.S.-made Boeing planes—illustrated another aspect of China’s evolution and of the United States–Chinese interaction: the symbolic and also practical significance of American dominance in aerospace and aviation, a field in which China had ambitions but few achievements.
It is hard for rich-country residents—Europeans, North Americans, Japanese, Australians, New Zealanders, and others—to contemplate such simple joy in material progress without a slight mocking smile. For them, prosperity, in an overall sense, has been thoroughly taken for granted, for a long time, and the uneven and imperfect blessings of progress are well understood. But at least for people over the age of thirty in China, the excitement about modernization is still (largely) genuine and sincere.
It has relied on and been shaped by foreigners, especially Americans, to a degree that few people inside or outside China recognize. Indeed, the transformation of China’s airline systems from one of the most dangerous in the world to one of the safest is largely a testament to underpublicized but highly important efforts by Chinese and American companies and governments.
Its efforts to build a modern air-travel system, in parallel with the road-building and track-laying whose effects are so obvious across China, reflect the central government’s sharp awareness of a challenge very similar to the one that propelled American development through the United States’s first century or so as a nation: the need to create physical connections across a continental nation of great geographic, cultural, and economic extremes.
Military purchases and airmail contracts were how early airlines—and aircraft companies—paid for their development.
Feng Ru became obsessed with aviation, produced Chinese translations of reports on the Wright brothers and their competitors, and decided to create an airplane of his own. He worked in secret, in a tiny room that he grandly called the Guangdong Aircraft Factory; he ordered parts from a variety of manufacturers so that no one supplier would be wise to his plans. By 1909, he had designed and built a biplane that, on September 21, he successfully kept aloft for more than twenty minutes in the hills outside Oakland.
During the “anti-Japanese war,” which is the way Chinese histories refer to the entire period from 1937 to 1945, Chinese forces had essentially no air power of their own.
When the civil war was over and the communists were in charge, China had only the most rudimentary aviation industry or establishment. Some two hundred airplanes total were left after more than a decade of war—fewer than one day’s production for the United States during its World War II peak.
Today, some quarter million people, more than the total worldwide payroll of Boeing and Airbus combined, work in Xi’an’s aviation industries, supervised by a Chinese engineer in his fifties who has a bust of George Washington in his office.
China’s development strategy over the past thirty years can be seen as one mammoth attempt to will itself onto the path of modern industrial development.
But even as the barnstorming era sustained public excitement about aviation, three longer-term “real” markets for airplanes and air services began to emerge: the military; airmail transport; and the bare beginnings of a passenger-airline business.
The combination of instrument guidance and jet propulsion gave aircraft lasting military and economic importance.
China had warfare, revolution, and turmoil through nearly the first eighty years of the twentieth century. It was cut off, by design and by circumstances, from the mainstreams of technical competition and innovation everywhere else.
The safety record in those years was terrible, as we would have guessed from looking at the equipment. But news of crashes was hushed up, so we didn’t know enough to worry.
The CAAC was about to receive its first three Boeing 747s. This purchase—like all major airline sales in the modern age—was as much a diplomatic gesture as a commercial transaction, constituting a big and noticeable U.S. export to China.
As with air travel in most other parts of the world, the majority of crashes in China occurred either on takeoff or on landing. This makes sense as soon as you think about it: That’s when the aircraft is in the most vulnerable position, since it is closest to the ground.
For the airlines, there are multiple redundant checks: flight crew, airline dispatches, mechanics, along with regulators all have to agree that every requirement has been met before a flight can take off. The most junior inspector, armed with a rule book, can overrule a senior airline official and say it is not safe to fly.
In the world of international aviation, airplanes were inspected according to rigid schedules. After a certain number of days, or flight hours, or takeoffs, an aircraft could not legally make another trip until it had had crucial parts checked. This scrutiny pays off—think how often buses, cars, trains, and subways fail, and how rarely commercial airliners do.
In 1997, a Chinese airliner plane crashed in Shenzhen, just north of Hong Kong, killing thirty-five people and injuring dozens more. The crash investigation indicated basic errors by both the pilots aboard, who made two landing attempts in the middle of a thunderstorm rather than diverting to a safer landing site.
Because of careful warnings by Joe T and others, the U.S. training team was hyper-sensitive about two aspects of this training exercise for their Chinese colleagues. One was to present all their recommendations in terms of meeting international standards for air safety and airline procedures, rather than seeming to say, This is how we do it in the U.S. of A. Presenting the challenge this way made it far more palatable to the Chinese side. Learning to comply with international standards was one more sign of modernization in China; doing things the “American way” could seem like a sign of continued subservience.
“The Chinese have a term, ‘air-drop soldier,’ for someone who is dropped in because of high-level connections but doesn’t know what to do,” Joe T said. “Yang did just the opposite, making sure he had the right people in these roles.”
“Those exchanges started in 1997, and they have never stopped,” Joe T told me in Beijing in 2011. It was the beginning of the underpublicized but thoroughgoing near-integration of the U.S. and Chinese aviation establishments in safety measures.
Then came the low-cost manufacturing boom whose effects began to be noticed throughout the world in the early 1990s. This was different from Japan’s modern manufacturing boom, which had started in the 1960s, in that China’s was largely driven by foreign firms. Dell, Walmart, Apple, Siemens, GM, GE—they and hundreds of others shifted and outsourced operations to China, whereas the most important steps in Japan’s development were taken mainly by their own big companies.
China’s low-wage industrial boom differed from India’s development through the same period in that it depended much less on an educated workforce, like the software engineers working in Bangalore and Hyderabad, and more on hardworking young men and women straight from the countryside.
After a while, I learned to apply an “accelerated aging” factor to any structure I saw.
Simply keeping its existing bridges, freeways, and waterworks from falling apart is the infrastructure challenge for the United States.
Part of the success of China’s infrastructure strategy is that it has made every other kind of growth more attainable. When factory wages go up in the Shenzhen area north of Hong Kong, outsourcing businesses might think about relocating to Vietnam or India. But they are more likely to end up heading to Sichuan or Gansu province in inland China, because the Chinese roads and facilities are likely to be so much better than those of any country that has not been building at such a frantic pace through recent years.
The problem for the Chinese economy has become its dependence on stimulus through investment.
China’s several-trillion-dollar war chest of foreign holdings, built up from its long string of trade surpluses, gives it advantages. But China’s reliance on foreign customers is a serious vulnerability.
In proportional terms, China has in recent years been five times as reliant on foreign customers to create domestic jobs as America was in 1929. So unless China can find a sustainable way to keep selling when its customers have stopped buying, it will face proportionately greater employment shock.
Will it be possible to move from assembly factories, which capture a small share of the value, to the brand names that get most of the profit? And therefore to convert China from a workhouse of the world to one of its sources of innovation?
In the mid-2000s, I heard a way of thinking about these questions that has stayed with me ever since. It is the concept of the “smiley curve,” and I heard about it from Liam Casey, an Irish businessman who had lived and worked for nearly ten years in Southern China. The smiley curve is a U-shaped graph (named after the smiley-face symbols of the 1970s) that covers the different stages of a product’s development. On one end of the curve, at the highest point on the left side, are corporate brands, with the extra market value they bring—Apple, Mercedes, GE, Samsung, all of which command a premium compared with their generic counterparts. Next comes product concept and industrial design—thinking up the iPad, the S-class car, GE’s new turbine engines. Then, moving down the curve, come high-value components—turbine blades, graphics chips, advanced displays. Then the commodity components, like simple memory chips. At the bottom of the curve comes assembly—the process of combining the elements into a finished product. Moving up the other side of the curve, as it rises, are transportation—DHL or FedEx—and then retailer’s margin, and then after-sale service. The height of the curve indicates the relative profitability of each stage of the process. The highest values are at its two extremes—the extra profit that goes to an Apple- or Mercedes-branded product, and the margin from retail sales and service. The lowest value is at the bottom of the curve, where the actual manufacturing takes place. And that lowest niche is the one that China has occupied throughout the first thirty years of its growth. The work was done in China, and the money went everyplace else.
This pattern is generally not known outside China (except by the corporations doing the outsourcing) but is very well understood by China’s political and economic leadership.
Chinese manufacturers take orders from Western companies that have designed products for their home markets. They have no involvement with product development, innovation, market research, and even packaging.”
Every policy paper, every speech, just about every conference or newspaper editorial since the mid-2000s has stressed China’s “need to move up the value chain” or “create a high-value economic base” or “switch to high-margin industries for a better life.”
the concept of the “apex predator”—the lion on the savanna, the wolf or puma in the forest, the hawk or eagle in the air, the marlin or salmon in the sea. Their existence depends on many tiers of prey beneath them. If they survive, it suggests that the ecosystem as a whole is robust.
“The emissions of major pollutants far exceed environmental capacity with serious environmental pollution,” that white paper said. “Environmental problems at different stages of [the] industrialization process of developed countries over the past several hundred years [are now] concentrated in China.”12 The problem is so deep and widespread that for now the point is simply to mention that it affects every aspect of China’s development.
China’s cancer epidemics, and the “cancer villages” found near a number of factories or mines in the countryside, are consequences of decades of uncontrolled industrial emissions.
The reported air-pollution levels in major cities are routinely in the “hazardous” level, by international standards, and until 2012 the Chinese government did not even measure or report on particulate matter that the rest of the world considers the most dangerous form of air pollution.
According to the study, within a twenty-year period, from 2005 to 2025, more people will be added to China’s major cities than now live in the entire United States.
The rural-to-urban shifts that transformed the culture and economy of Europe through the course of the nineteenth century and North America through the twentieth will be compressed in China into a span of a relatively few years.
Unlike the United States and Europe, China largely skipped the landline era and went straight to mobile phones. It similarly has the chance to skip the suburban-sprawl model of mid-twentieth-century America and go straight to the higher-density urban patterns that made subway and streetcar lines efficient for cities like Paris, London, and New York.
Decisions being made right now will affect China’s look, livability, sustainability, and environmental and cultural effect on the world for decades to come.
An average of two hundred people die each day in China in accidents at construction sites, coal mines, factories, or other industrial sites.
Late in 2010, there was a three-week-long dead-gridlock traffic jam on the roads that led hundreds of miles north from Beijing toward the coal-mining zones of Inner Mongolia. Most of the traffic that had overwhelmed the roads was private trucks carrying coal and avoiding bigger, newer roads on which they would have had to pay tolls. Indeed, one of the big pushes for the country’s high-speed rail system is to get the people off the “normal” trains so there is more space for coal and other goods.
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.
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.
“I find that my ‘textbook’ for teaching English is the Boeing technical manual of the 747,” the young American woman told me.
“Imagine being shrugged at by airport ground staff, and told that ‘military exercises’ had caused your flight to be cancelled. This sort of thing has long been accepted as standard operating procedure in China.”
“No one in Beijing had seen aircraft above the city,” he told me several years later; airline flights were far out of town, and helicopters were very rare. “They got very excited and could hardly believe what they were seeing. They said, There’s the Pentagon! And the White House! It is four years after 9/11, and the flights just kept coming in.” The evening experience was, Joe T thought, more dramatic than any number of briefings in demonstrating what a liberalized air-traffic system might mean.
Despite the image of the great monolith, China had in fact operated through the reform era as a patchwork of citywide or province-wide trials. If an approach—say, allowing more direct foreign investment—worked in its first trial near Shenzhen, then it might be expanded to Xiamen or Dalian. If it failed or didn’t work as planned, it could be closed down and some other approach would be tried elsewhere.
Although the authors of the report could not have known or foreseen this, the Chinese government’s willingness to listen suddenly increased after the devastating Sichuan earthquake, when thousands of survivors died of blood loss, shock, and exposure in the following two or three days, as rescuers tried to reach them on foot through steep terrain where existing roads had been wiped out. Because China’s total helicopter fleet was smaller than, say, Portugal’s, and barely one thousandth as large as that of the United States, there was simply no way to get supplies in or survivors out in time. Japan had suffered a serious though not catastrophic earthquake at about the same time; rescue helicopters were overhead in less than five minutes. In many devastated areas of Sichuan, it was five days before rescuers appeared.
Compared with Boeing and Airbus, Pratt & Whitney, or GE, Cirrus is a niche player in the world’s aerospace industry. But it has unexpectedly been at the center of important decisions about China’s aviation future.
Developing and certifying airplanes, especially new models from a brand-new company, takes an almost limitless amount of up-front capital.
The world’s established aircraft-makers have one big question about China. It is their specific version of the question the rest of the world has about China as a whole. In its simplest form: Is China more of a threat? Or an opportunity? If it’s both, is it more of one or the other? If the answer to that question is uncertain, when will outsiders know which is more likely? And is there anything they can do to bend the result in the direction they would prefer?
The great promise for Boeing and Airbus, and for their smaller brethren like Embraer and Gulfstream, Cessna and Beech, is to sell more of their products in the one country likely to increase its fleet dramatically in the next ten years. The great nightmare for these same companies is that the price of entering the Chinese market will be joint ventures, technology transfers, potential theft of intellectual property, and local-content requirements that in effect force them to create and foster the Chinese competitors who will one day unseat them.
a system to rival the existing United States–run GPS network. (And since the current GPS system is not just “United States–run” but managed by the United States Air Force, it is hard to blame the Chinese military for recommending this step. War between the United States and China is unlikely, but if it happened, the PLA would not want to have its navigation systems vulnerable to disruption by the other side.)
If you were going to write the script by which Chinese aerospace interests convert their current plans into eventual world dominance, the steps might be described as follows: 1. Political pressure. All around the world, but even more so in China, the market for airplanes depends on political as much as commercial factors. The central government of China, when it does not directly approve or determine airlines’ purchasing plans, heavily influences them. It is in the government’s interest to play Boeing and Airbus against each other, so neither will be allowed a fully dominant share—and both will be affected by larger political relations between their home base and the Chinese government. Through the early 1990s, before Airbus had really gotten going, Boeing provided nearly all the new airliners for China, and Boeing officials were de facto liaisons between the Chinese and American aviation establishments. By 2010, Boeing’s share stood at 55 percent, and Airbus’s at 43 percent. Each of them knew that future changes would depend on their commercial improvements—but also on the government’s decisions about the right balance to set. The more heavily the balance eventually shifts in favor of China’s own emerging producers, the less will obviously remain for either Airbus or Boeing. 2. Shifts of production. Among the criteria the Chinese government obviously watches very closely are foreign companies’ willingness to teach local Chinese firms and workers to do what the foreigners did. Thus Airbus set up its only assembly plant outside Europe in Tianjin, not far from Beijing, in the late 2000s, where it assembled most of the Airbuses that China agreed to buy. Similarly, GE agreed in 2011 to share engine technology with a COMAC subsidiary, as part of an arrangement to supply engines for the C919; Boeing increased its reliance on Chinese suppliers; the small-plane manufacturers Cessna and Diamond set up production plants in China; and others in the business shifted their production to where they hoped the market would be. 3. Transfer of knowledge. By legitimate learning or unauthorized copying, Chinese firms quickly learn what the foreigners know, leading to: 4. The natural conclusion. Lower-cost production at higher volumes from Chinese factories, with bigger shares of the market inside China, which in turn becomes a platform for exports around the world. Former Western industry leaders must find another business.
With the 787, Boeing outsourced not simply specific components but much of the design and integration of the aircraft, which had been its distinguishing advantage. A larger share of the plane’s components and subassemblies would be contracted out to suppliers, including many in Japan and some in China. Less of the work would be done start-to-finish under Boeing’s own control. This was economically rational, in that many contractors could beat Boeing’s internal price. But in a larger business sense it proved problematic, since delays from the contractors and difficulties in combining and coordinating their work caused a rippling series of postponements in the Dreamliner’s delivery date.
The sheer impossibility of becoming successful in aviation quickly. Anyone stepping on a Boeing airplane knows that other passengers have gotten on Boeing planes—and, in a statistically overwhelming majority of cases, have gotten off safely at the other end—for most of a century. Anyone getting on an Airbus knows that they have been in comparably safe operation, by the thousands, for several decades. Bombardier, Embraer, and Fokker have been increasingly familiar factors in travel. By definition, it would be decades before Chinese-made planes could rack up as long a safe-operating history as the established companies already have—even if those first few decades were completely accident-free. (And even if the background reputation for low-defect production from Chinese factories was a match for Airbus’s or Boeing’s, which it now is not.) Moreover, operating an airline and maintaining airplanes requires a constellation of skills found in few other industries. Repair facilities, with spare parts and trained engineers, have to be ready wherever the planes might fly. Companies must learn to deal with highly—and properly!—intrusive safety inspectors, for both aircraft and crew.
“Aircraft are being eaten by their own value chains,” Aboulafia told me in 2011. “The real value goes to the GE or Rockwell Collins”—GE, like Rolls-Royce and Pratt & Whitney, makes jet turbine engines; Rockwell Collins, like Honeywell, makes avionics systems. “They’re going for a tube with the national flag on the back,” Aboulafia told a Seattle newspaper about the Chinese projects. “They’re just developing a chunk of metal onto which all the real value added is inserted by Western suppliers.”
The most important elements in developing better airplanes are all skills or technologies in which Chinese companies currently lag. These areas are better engines, more advanced avionics, design and construction of wing surfaces, and the “systems integration” of the literally millions of components that go into a modern airplane. They are fields in which a North American, European, or Japanese firm dominates, Russian firms are active, but no Chinese institution is yet competitive.
In the United States, Honeywell was generally known for home thermostats, but for the past two decades its most important businesses have been large-scale high-tech monitoring and control systems. These are used in the energy business, at large medical centers, and—crucially and profitably—in modern airliners.
Honeywell won the contracts to provide four systems, from the wheels and braking system to the flight controls and inertial-navigation electronics, for a total value of $16 billion. No other company wound up with more than one such contract, and few outsiders understood the C919 as thoroughly as Tedjarati did.
Could the Chinese system master huge, moonshot-style challenges? Of course! But “building a certified commercial aircraft is much more difficult than going to the moon,” he said. “A moon shot is a single mission. You’re sending four or five people. If the people die they become national heroes. This is so much more complicated, because you’re making something for the public that they’re going to be using around the world, and nothing can go wrong.”
Even aviation buffs, he said, can barely imagine the scale or complexity of large-airframe construction, or the potential for small imperfections or missed connections to create major delays and problems. For instance, the dull-sounding challenge of “cockpit integration.” This would be like designing high-end computer software—for a computer that must simultaneously monitor and control high-temperature power plants; operate and test electrical systems with thousands of connectors and many miles of cable; give pilots the data they need to control a vehicle that can weigh nearly a million pounds and travel at nearly the speed of sound; and do countless other functions, all with triple redundancy or more, and with the constant potential of having to switch to emergency-rescue mode.
He pointed out that in the entire world there are relatively few engineers experienced in the complex work of integrating software for avionics and flight controls, and most of them already work for a handful of companies, like his own.
How will we know whether this situation is changing, and Chinese competitors are succeeding in this complex industry? The most significant indicator would be progress against what is now by far the greatest obstacle to Chinese preeminence in the world aircraft industry: the inability of Chinese companies to produce jet engines that are anywhere close in power, efficiency, or reliability to the top-line offerings from GE, Rolls-Royce, and Pratt & Whitney.
Americans and Western Europeans have been steadily refining airplane engines for more than a century, and jet engines for sixty-plus years.
Partly it is because the traits that have been so valuable during China’s infrastructure-and-export boom—high volume, quick turnaround, low cost, a “happy with crappy” tolerance for product defects—are the opposite of what is required for the high-precision work of engine development.
GE is investing about $2 billion per year in research and development of new engines; Pratt & Whitney and Rolls-Royce together invest about $3 billion more.
“Joint ventures with jet engine market leaders like General Electric (GE) have the potential to give the Chinese aerospace industry a 100 piece puzzle with 90 of the pieces already assembled,”
As of 2010, all human activity together put roughly 37 billion tons (37 gigatons) of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year. Twenty years earlier, it was less than 25 billion tons. Twenty years later, it could well be 50 billion tons.
Carbon dioxide persists in the atmosphere for many decades, even centuries—unlike methane, which has a more powerful greenhouse effect but can disperse within a single decade.
Of those 37 billion to 40 billion tons emitted in 2010, aviation in all forms accounted for about 2 percent in sheer quantity—and perhaps twice that in climate-change potential, because the pollutants are more damaging when injected into the atmosphere at high altitude. The world’s entire shipping fleet, which together with aviation ties the globalized economy together, contributes about the same total of carbon emissions.
Those wasted hours were an analogue for why air travel in China has been exceptionally inefficient. The military’s control of the airspace around even the biggest commercial airports is the equivalent of having only a few narrow exits for a jammed parking lot. (That is, planes have to line up for chances to pass through the narrow military-authorized corridors.) And the military’s control of nearly all the airspace between Chinese destinations means that flights within China, even by the favored national carriers, fly indirect routes that are the equivalent of going all around the city on a ring road. These inefficiencies in air-traffic control are the main reason flights are more often delayed in China than in other major aviation countries; why their scheduled travel time, per mile flown, is much slower than in North America or Europe; and why they burn up to twice as much fuel per passenger mile as their counterparts in Europe or North America.
In China, military restrictions sometimes keep jets at 10,000 or 15,000 feet for extended periods, where they become the equivalent of gas-guzzlers.
Another is reduction of the airport nuisance factor in big cities. The combination of very precise real-time GPS readings, which can locate even a fast-moving airliner within a space of a few feet, and sophisticated new computerized autopilots that can follow a very tightly defined path, now allows airplanes to fly exact slalom-style 3-D courses through the sky in a way that has never been conceivable before.
The western half of China, from Xinjiang in the north to Tibet and Yunnan in the south, is very forbidding country for aviation. It includes some of the world’s remotest and most mountainous territory. This is dangerous to fly in for obvious reasons: peaks, violent storms, gusty winds.
Fulton’s new RNP approach for Juneau, which plotted out a very precise set of waypoints for the airplane’s autopilot to follow as it wound its way through treacherous terrain, allowed safe descent through clouds and served as a proof-of-concept for making other “impossible” airports more accessible.
Foreigners are in theory forbidden to do this kind of mapping in China, because of holdover national-security concerns. Fulton explained that he had to make the measurements, because the official Chinese maps were so imprecise or wrong.
The business boomed so much that in late 2009 the Naverus company was acquired by GE and is now known as GE Aviation PBN Services.
Normal fossil-fuel deposits are only rarely the remains of dinosaurs; much more frequently, they come from ancient fossilized algae beds.)
His presentation centers on a graph that projects likely emissions from airline travel through the year 2050. This chart has been the premise for Boeing’s argument that it is time for an all-out effort for practical biofuels, especially from algae.
When a jet engine burns fuel that comes from algae, it emits carbon dioxide just as if it were burning fuel pumped straight from the Persian Gulf. But the algae would have removed at least as much CO2 from the atmosphere while it was growing. So in principle, and with allowances for inefficiencies and fuel costs in the production process, algae-based fuel could allow airplanes to run on something much closer to a “carbon-neutral” basis,
In one of the worst policy mistakes of modern times, the U.S. government subsidized farmers to grow crops, mainly corn, that could be converted into ethanol and blended into gasoline supplies. This made no sense in energy-efficiency terms. (It took more energy to plant, fertilize, harvest, and process the corn than the ethanol yielded.) It made no sense in economic terms, except as a subsidy to the farmers and agribusiness. It made no sense in moral terms, since it diverted crops that could be used for human or animal feed into transportation fuel.
By process of elimination, all these criteria have led mainly to algae. In principle it can produce hundreds of times more fuel, per acre of surface area, as oil palms (which are largely grown on land where tropical forests have been clear-cut), soybeans, corn, or other crops that can be used for biofuels. It grows and produces the oil many times faster than more complex plants—an algae crop cycle is a matter of days rather than weeks or months. It can be grown on land that is otherwise too barren or unusable, and in water that is too polluted or brackish for any other human or agricultural purpose.
The idea that the contradictions will continue, so that China will in the long run be both economically successful and politically controlled, lies behind the widespread projections that the world must soon confront the ripple effects of a powerful new Chinese model of authoritarian capitalism, and a “Beijing consensus” about how the world’s economies should interact. In this view, economic vitality ultimately determines the success or failure of the associated political system.
By extension, each new high-speed rail line that is opened in China—each supermodern airport, each advanced semiconductor factory, each addition to national output or export surplus or head count of engineers—confirms the viability of the Chinese approach of state-fostered market development coinciding with tight political controls.
China is able to build so many new airports, and the United States and Western Europe so few, in part because Chinese officials can commandeer the land.
Many Westerners fear that the more successful China’s economy is, the more threatening its model and ideal will inevitably become. And of course it’s not just Westerners who think that a shift in economic fundamentals will have a profound political effect. A frequent theme in Chinese discourse is that the growing power of the country’s system will finally allow its representatives to talk back to the West, including about the supposedly “universal” values Westerners preach.
Over the past generation, and the past decade especially, China-watchers have framed this choice for the country: Either the growing power of the Chinese economy will change the rest of the international system, effectively making it more Chinese, or the growing prosperity of the Chinese people will change their own country’s system, making it more international.
Yet let a foreigner tell an American that the country is “declining,” and there will be a reaction. Denial, assent, an argument that there’s still hope—something. The intensity of the reaction obviously underscores the point that this is one of Americans’ longstanding sources of self-doubt.
In nearly every formal statement, response to a question, or impromptu comment in the presence of reporters, he returned to the same note, an insistence on respect. Improved relations must start on the basis of mutual respect, he would say. Or: Our nations must seek ways to work together, but on the platform of respect. Or: Only from a vantage point of mutual respect and equality can we make progress.
Chinese people who are familiar with American history point out the many similarities between the current Han attitude and the drive toward Manifest Destiny thinking in the United States from the nineteenth century onward.
Over the past decade, the Chinese media have consistently presented the message that the “uncontrolled” Internet is a wild and dangerous place, full of criminals, perverts, and other threats to the well-being of “netizens,” notably youths. Surveys of mass Chinese opinion, as opposed to outspoken “netizen” minorities, have consistently shown large majorities saying that they are grateful for government monitoring of this potential menace.
Google, with its range of services, was a special target, for obvious reasons. One study found that it took forty-four times longer for a Gmail screen to come up than the domestic Chinese system QQ, and eight times longer than Yahoo.
But in this case, I came to believe the hypothesis that the Internet controls were a purposeful trial run, an experiment to learn exactly what it would take to close down the VPNs altogether if it came to an emergency. Indeed, I interviewed enough tech officials, from enough companies from enough different parts of the world, to be confident in a conclusion I generally resisted about China: that there was a deliberate plan to cut off all access, that it was being tested, and that it would certainly be used if conditions became tense enough.
Opinion polls in China, for what they are worth, suggest that many people were indeed comforted by the government’s role in shielding them from dangerous views. But I know there are people who feel infantilized and diminished by this reminder that they’re not quite part of the modern world. I know because I’ve met many of them.
An increasing number of domestic Chinese and international reports have underscored what anyone teaching classes in Chinese universities has noticed: that Western complaints about “publish or perish” pressures are nothing compared with the imperative for industrial-scale output among many Chinese scholars.
Clearly Chinese scientists are capable of world-leading work, and many Chinese-born or ethnically Chinese scientists have been recognized with Nobel Prizes for their research. But as of 2011, all such awards have been for work conducted in American, British, French, or other foreign laboratories. No one of any ethnicity has won an award for scientific work within a Chinese institution.
The foreigners who say that today’s China is totalitarian are not paying attention. There are too many people, doing too many inventive things, across too great a stretch of territory to be under direct governmental supervision and control. The system is instead authoritarian and decentralized, with the government cracking down where it feels it must, and observing points of discontent and pressure among the population to address them if it can.
If peasants or migrant workers are about to revolt, the government’s Plan B is to send in troops to repress them. Plan A is to placate them, if possible, with jobs, schools, or other benefits.
Full modernization depends on the predictability that is another term for the rule of law. It is the sense that personal or company assets, once developed, won’t be arbitrarily seized; that a society’s basic operating principles won’t be changed capriciously so that what was taken for granted yesterday is a serious crime today; that the various interests affected by policies and plans won’t be entirely ignored as policies change.
China’s most precious assets, the aspiring next generation of the best-positioned families, were more and more being sent overseas.
Such extensive knitting-together of China’s leaders with outside institutions makes it easier for China and the rest of the world to coexist in the long run. But it creates a deep strain inside the country. China’s leaders don’t believe enough in the country’s own school system to place their children in it.
The incident at the station, however, reveals the disconnect between the government’s fixation with income inequality and what’s really been rubbing the masses the wrong way. What people resent isn’t wealth, it’s privilege. By and large, your average Chinese worker admires people who have gotten rich through cleverness or hard work, because that’s what they aspire to do themselves. What bothers them, though, is the growing sense that there’s a special class of people who get to live by a different set of rules than everyone else.
In its pluses and its minuses, everything about this approach—the approach that has created the world’s reigning power of the moment—is fundamentally different from the principles behind the rise of the aspirant great power, China.
But in its international dealings as well as in most of its domestic operations, today’s China gives more weight to duties and ethics based on personal relations than on abstract principles of how people in general should be treated.
At that moment in China it struck me as an illustration of the reality that the consciousness of a “general” public interest is underdeveloped, compared with interest that affects individual families in the here and now—and the country relative to other parts of the world.
China is steadily gaining the hard power that comes from factories and finance. Its military hard power is increasing, though from an extremely low base. But lasting influence in the world has come more from soft than hard power: ideas for living, models of individual, commercial, and social life that people emulate because they are attracted rather than because they are compelled.
If a society thinks it is unique because of its system, or its style, or its standards, it can easily exert soft power, because outsiders can imagine themselves taking part in that same system and adopting those same styles. But if it thinks it is unique because of its identity—“China is successful because we are Chinese”—the appeal to anyone else is self-limiting.
The public-opinion elements of the soft-power campaign have often backfired, since they have been crudely propagandistic in the fashion of the government’s internal news management.