China Airborne (15 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There were some blank spots in this outline, but the Weinan team could worry about those concerns later. Meanwhile, the local authorities had gone ahead and paved what looked like the main runway at Dallas–Fort Worth airport, minus either Dallas or Fort Worth on the horizon, or any of the other sprawling developed tracts in between. The foreign visitors were stunned to walk around the tarmac in the baking heat, distracted mainly by posters showing an idealized version of how the scene might someday look.

Through the rest of the day I filled notebooks with the local planners’ dreams and visions of what would become of these vacant zones in the bright sunshine. “Our runway apron is one hundred thousand square meters—very large!” a young English-speaking woman from the city government said. “We will have hangars, hotels, some aerospace-tech incubators.”

It could happen. Similarly, the now-empty cities being built in western China’s frontier districts might soon be populated, and the Armani stores and Maserati dealerships in Chengdu or Wuhan might pay off. All across China, I kept running into people determined to plow ahead despite all obstacles.

This led to a third familiar note in Weinan: a determination just to plow ahead, and to worry about obstacles later. We spent the rest of the day being entertained by musical and dancing troupes costumed in “authentic” village garb from the area. And then a few of the visitors asked about the problems no one had mentioned.