China Airborne (30 page)
Authors: James Fallows
Apart from “ultra-populated,” the other distinctions clearly reflected a narcissistic view. Russia is almost twice as big as “ultra-vast” China; Egypt, Turkey, and other countries have “ultra-ancient” histories; Indians, Javanese, Koreans, and members of other societies feel their cultures are “ultra-deep.” The significant point about the statement is not whether it is true, but that so many people in China might believe it. As individuals they might deal easily with people from other countries and cultures. (I cannot think of a town I have been, anywhere from Western Africa to Eastern Europe, without at least some Chinese residents.) But the standards they would apply to their society would be rules for China, not rules for mankind.
A Chinese intellectual named Yang Hengjun made just that point in response to Zhang’s essay. Yang made a trenchant criticism of the crony-capitalism that he said was creating inequality, corruption, and ultimately stagnation in China. (And soon after this essay was published, Yang was among the writers who disappeared from public view, during the Jasmine crackdown.) He also quoted, approvingly, a pre-communist-era philosopher on China’s weakness for nationally minded as opposed to
universal thinking. “All reactionary thought in contemporary China is of the same tradition,” that philospher, Ai Siqi, wrote in 1940. “It emphasizes China’s ‘national characteristics,’ harps on China’s ‘special nature,’ and wipes aside the general principles of humanity, arguing that China’s social development can only follow China’s own path.”
The British in their centuries of strength meant to bring parliaments and courts to their colonies. The Romans had sought to export their systems long before. The Americans preached their universal ideal; the Soviets and the true-believing communist Chinese had a message for all the downtrodden of the world. But, Yang Hengjun said in the conclusion of his essay, the more China emphasized its own uniqueness, as a “civilizational economy” that combined history, scale, and technology in a way that by definition no other society could approach, the more it excluded itself from discussions about alternatives for 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.
Soft power becomes powerful when people imagine themselves transformed, improved, by adopting a new style. Koreans and Armenians imagine they will be freer or more successful if they become Americans—or Australians or Canadians. Young
men and women from the provinces imagine they will be more glamorous if they look and act like people in Paris, London, or New York. 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.
From the Chinese government’s point of view, soft power
2
has so far boiled down to using money to win other people’s goodwill or acquiescence. Chinese-built roads in Africa and Latin America; Chinese investment and interaction in Europe and the United States. 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.
Even before the bad publicity China suffered with the jailing of Liu Xiaobo and the Jasmine crackdowns, a scholar from the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, Johan Lagerkvist, argued that China would likely lose more and more international support unless the government fundamentally reconceived its connections with the rest of the world.
3
“China’s internal stability/security and survival of the Communist Party will always be more important to China’s leaders than the image it projects for outside consumption,” he contended. A choice between maintaining domestic order and pleasing outside critics was no choice at all. “Pouring money into Chinese equivalents to CNN and Al-Jazeera won’t help [without] reform initiatives,” he said.
In every country, internal interests come first. With more time on the world stage, China’s leaders may learn to do what their American, British, French, and other counterparts also had
to learn: at least feigning awareness of the interest of mankind. China’s predicament is more difficult because its emergence is so rapid, and so much is unclear about other ways in which it will change.
I am sitting in Washington, D.C., as I write these words, and I realize how different the world feels to me than when I was sitting in Beijing, or Yinchuan, or Chengdu, or Linyi, with the chaos and achievement of Chinese efforts just outside my window. From a distance, it can seem strange to think that there are limits or challenges to China’s progress. The
action
, the sense of can-do, is so different from the political and economic paralysis of America’s age of constraint.
But I know how much is in flux, and how much is at stake. It is not an evasion of analysis but a recognition of China’s complexity, and the world’s, to say that a wide range of outcomes is possible, and that it is worth watching very carefully signals like those I have mentioned to recalibrate our estimates. Nearly every day of these past five years—when watching the earth being scraped away for airports or highways, when seeing apartments put up within a week and the families who used to live in the knocked-down tenements sent scrambling to other parts of town, when seeing the beggars next to the Bentleys and the security agents watching students in the Internet cafés—I have thought to myself, How long can this go on? And nearly every day, when seeing those same sights, I have asked myself, What is this system
not
capable of? Anyone who says China is destined to succeed or fail, to open up or close down, either knows much more than I do, or much less. Anyone so sure is not willing to acknowledge the great unknowability of life in general and life in this quarter of mankind.
Introduction
1.
In flying school, you learn when the instructor asks you to close your eyes and try to control the plane by seat-of-the-pants “feel” alone. When he tells you to open your eyes a minute later, you are inevitably in a spiral toward the ground. Minus the instructor, this is the story of the John F. Kennedy, Jr., accident; he had not yet been trained in these “instrument rules” flying skills and got into an irrecoverable spiral when he lost sight of the horizon in the evening mist over the ocean.
1.
If curious, you can test this yourself: look for any big Chinese city on an online map from Google, Bing, or other major providers, then click back and forth between “map” and “satellite” views. In most other parts of the world, the two views align. For Chinese cities, they’re slightly mismatched, by margins of perhaps ten or twenty meters. What’s marked as a road in the map view might be the middle of an apartment block in the satellite view.
2.
As the passage in a speech by Wen Jiabao said, “We will organize the implementation of industrial innovation and development projects, including those on National Broadband Internet Agenda, cloud computing, the Internet of Things, integrated circuits, flat-panel displays, space infrastructure, regional aircraft and industrialization of general aviation aircraft, as well as major application and demonstration, projects on the health of the people and on using information technology to benefit the people.” From the official English version of the plan as carried by China Real Time Report, “China NPC 2011: The Reports,”
Wall Street Journal
, March 5, 2011,
http://blogs.wsj.com/chinarealtime/2011/03/05/china-npc-2011-reports-full-text/
.
3.
Of many theories about Buick’s present popularity in China, the one I like best involves spillover glamour from its days as a Rolls-Royce-style imported luxury marque in the precommunist era, especially in Westernized Shanghai.
4.
Xin Dingding, “Aviation Sector Has High Hopes for Next 5 Years,”
China Daily
, February 25, 2011.
http://europe.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2011-02/25/
content_12077726.htm
.
5.
Lu Haoting, “China May Lead Global Aviation Recovery,”
China Daily
, September 17, 2009.
http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/bizchina/2009-09/17/
content_8701529.htm
.
6.
Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, “Air China Value Greater than United-Continental, American, JetBlue, AirTran & US Air Combined,” March 9, 2011.
http://www.centreforaviation.com/analysis/air-china-value-greater-than-united-continental-american-jetblue-airtran—us-air-combined-pt-1-47146
.
7.
Centre for Asia Pacific Aviation, “World Airport Rankings 2010,” March 16, 2011.
http://www.centreforaviation.com/analysis/world-airport-rankings-2010-big-changes-to-global-top-30-beijing-up-to-2-heathrow-falls-to-4-47882
, and
http://www.centreforaviation.com/analysis/world-airport-rankings-2010-hong-kong-eclipses-memphis-as-the-worlds-busiest-cargo-hub-47887
.
8.
He meant small aircraft, which are roughly ten times more numerous than the large passenger craft in all commercial airlines’ fleets.
9.
“Details Emerge About the Hurun Report’s New Magazine for Chinese Billionaires, ‘Wings & Water,’ ”
Jing Daily
, March 16, 2011.
http://www.jingdaily.com/en/luxury/details-emerge-about-the-hurun-reports-new-magazine-for-chinese-billionaires-wings-water
. The Chinese name for the new magazine was simply
Qing
, essentially “Lift Up.”
10.
“The Chinese Private Jet Industry—Set to Soar,”
PrivateFly
, January 11, 2011.
http://blog.privatefly.com/?p=331
.
11.
Mo Lingjiao, “China’s First Private and Business Jet Expo Sparks Controversy,”
Global Times
, August 16, 2010.
http://en.huanqiu.com/china/society/2010-08/564149.html
.
12.
Thomas A. Horne, “China on the March,”
AOPA Online
.
http://www.aopa.org/aircraft/articles/2011/111009-china-on-the-march.html
.
1.
By military convention, whatever aircraft is carrying the incumbent President is known during that flight as
Air Force One
—or
Marine One
in the case of presidential helicopters,
Executive One
if it is a civilian aircraft, or
Navy One
if it is a naval aircraft like the one in which George W. Bush flew to a carrier deck during the “Mission Accomplished” ceremonies of 2003. Because the newly sworn-in President, Lyndon Johnson, was on the same flight that carried Kennedy and his widow back to Washington, that plane was still
Air Force One
.
2.
Mark Dougan,
A Political Economy Analysis of China’s Civil Aviation Industry
(New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 22. As Dougan, an Australian academic, put it, “Because China is so large and so geographically diverse, a coordinated transportation infrastructure was traditionally viewed as both essential to and a reflection of a ruling regime’s power and authority.” One of the many Americans who have worked in China’s aviation development put it this way: “I think Chinese officials wonder whether there has ever been a really strong country that didn’t have a strong aerospace sector.”
3.
Da Hsuan Feng, “The Legacy of Tsu Wong: From Boeing’s Genesis to NCKU,”
iTainan
, January 1, 2008.
http://www.itainan.org/forum/legacy-tsu-wong-%28%E7%8E%8B%E5%8A%A9%29%3A-boeing%E2%80%99s-genesis-ncku
.
4.
For more on Wong Tsu, see “Wong Tsu in 1916,” China National Aviation Corporation, undated.
http://www.cnac.org/wongtsu01.pdf
; Global Security, “Kuomintang Aviation,” undated.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/world/china/
aviation-history-12.htm
; Eve Dumovich, “The 1st and the Best,”
Boeing Frontiers
, December 2006,
http://www.boeing.com/news/frontiers/archive/2006/
december/ts_sf12.pdf
.
5.
“Feng Ru,”
ChinaCulture.org
, undated.
http://www.chinaculture.org/gb/en_aboutchina/2003-09/
24/content_26559.htm
.
6.
This account of Feng Ru’s aviation history draws from Rebecca Maksel, “The Father of Chinese Aviation,”
Smithsonian Air & Space
magazine, August 2008.
http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/The_Father_of_Chinese_Aviation.html
; also Patti Gully,
Sisters of Heaven
(San Francisco: Long River Press, 2007).
7.
Tai Ming Cheung, “Remaking Cinderella: The Nature and Development of China’s Aviation Industry,” testimony before the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission hearing on “China’s Emergent Military Aerospace and Commercial Aviation Capabilities. Panel IV: China’s Aviation Industrial Complex,” May 20, 2010, p. 3.
As part of this testimony he also said, “The aviation industry has more than 130 large and medium-sized factories and research institutes employing 250,000 workers scattered across the country, especially in the deep interior, and often possessing the same manufacturing and research attributes. But intense rivalry, local protectionism, and huge geographical distances mean that there is little cooperation or coordination among these facilities, preventing the ability to reap economies of scale, engage in innovation clustering, and also hampering efforts at consolidation.”
8.
On the general evolution of aircraft companies in the early decades, see U.S. Centennial of Flight Commission,
History of Flight
, “The First U.S. Aircraft Manufacturing Companies,” 2003.
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Aerospace/
earlyU.S/Aero1.htm
.
9.
History of Flight
, “Commercial Aviation: the 1920s.”
http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/
Commercial_Aviation/1920s/Tran1.htm
.
10.
Dougan,
A Political Economy
, pp. 38ff.
11.
Ibid., p. 39.
12.
The best known of these, Embry-Riddle, itself exemplifies the diverse and chaotic business conditions of aviation’s early days. A wealthy aviation enthusiast, T. Higbee Embry, joined with a former military pilot and air-show performer, John Paul Riddle, to form the Embry-Riddle company in Cincinnati in 1925. They sold airplanes, carried airmail, and offered flight instruction. By 1930, their flying services were absorbed into the newly formed American Airlines. A few years later, Riddle led the development of what became the Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Florida.
13.
Dougan,
A Political Economy
, p. 56. “The quality of the aircraft which would have had to be used were so inferior to what other industrialized countries were using, that it would have been an embarrassment to the government and detrimental to its image abroad.”
