Authors: James Fallows
China Airborne (14 page)
Until recently, aesthetics, like safety, have been a distant concern in the development of Chinese cities. Buildings left over from the Mao era are squat, Stalinist-looking, and now in terrible repair. Their successors from the late 1970s through the 1980s, when construction was still done quickly and very much on the cheap, are not much of an improvement. The opening words of a recent noir thriller set in Beijing,
Rock Paper Tiger
, by Lisa Brackmann, accurately evoke the feeling of much of late-twentieth-century urban China. “I’m living in this dump in Haidian Qu, close to Wudaokou, on the twenty-first floor of a decaying high-rise.” She is writing about the university district in the northwest of Beijing, but she could be describing much of urban China. “The lights have been out in the lobby since I moved in; they never finished the interior walls in the foyers outside the elevators; and the windows are boarded up, so every time I step outside the apartment door I’m in a weird twilight world of bare cement and blue fluorescent light.”
The next stage of China’s growth and advancement rests on the assumption that its population will be more and more concentrated in cities. Transportation within those cities, and among them, naturally becomes an important focus for government investment and therefore private profit. Especially
if—consistent with the other goals—better transportation can help China’s industries move to a higher “value level,” and deal with environmental problems at the same time.
4. Modern transport for China
Objects in motion have been the secret to China’s economic boom. Materials and supplies are in motion—steel brought to factories; cement from the plants where it is created to the construction sites where it is used; above all, coal, nearly ten million tons per day, hauled from the mines to power stations where it is burned to keep everything else going. Finished products have been in motion to their customers, within China and overseas. And
people
have had to move, by the tens of millions, from villages all across the countryside to the few dozen major cities where most of China’s industrial growth has occurred.
Each of these flows takes place in China on a scale matched nowhere else on earth, which makes the interlocking transportation networks—road, rail, boat, air—as important to China’s development as the transcontinental railroad, the interstate highways, and the airline network have been for the United States. But even China’s constantly expanded transportation networks have just barely kept up with the challenge of movement at this scale. For example:
• 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.
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• In the sprawl of the Pearl River Delta factory zone, where so many of the world’s electronic products—and toys, clothes, and housewares—are made, the production system in many electronic companies is built around the daily pickup schedules for the big international carriers. The factories work overnight or very early in the morning, all based on when the collection trucks from FedEx, UPS, and DHL will arrive to get shipments for the Hong Kong airport, where they will go off to customers in North America and around the world. At an aerospace conference in 2010, I met a FedEx official who was brimming with excitement about an announcement that he said would change outsourcing: cargo planes that could go efficiently nonstop from Hong Kong to Los Angeles. This would cut several hours off the existing cycle, with flights through Anchorage, Tokyo, or San Francisco. That in turn would make it easier for Apple, for example, to have Chinese-made products delivered in America the day after a customer pressed the “buy now” button on a Web site.
• The big freeways around port cities in China are not only newer and better than those in North America or Europe. Many are also less crowded, because they have modest tolls, equivalent to a few cents a mile. This is high enough to keep ordinary Chinese pleasure traffic off the roads—but low enough to be a worthwhile investment for companies moving goods straight to the airport, the seaport, or the railhead.
• And of course there is the largest movement of people in human history, the billion or so trips made each year at Spring Festival time, or lunar new year, which usually occurs between mid-January and early February. The 2009 documentary
Last Train Home
captured the predictable crisis and drama of the migrations: there are not enough seats, and train tickets are generally
not sold for round trips
. You have to wait in line at one station to get the outbound ticket, and then wait in line at the other station, in the other city, to get a ticket for the trip back. Think for a moment about the stress and inconvenience this creates.
The Spring Festival train and bus rides are events of surprising sociological, economic, logistic, and emotional consequence. Sociological, in that the holiday is the one time each year when families are reunited—if the journey is impossible for some reason, the opportunity is lost. Economic, not just because the industrial engine halts for a period but also because many employees use this time to shop for better work offers, or they decide not to return to the factories at all. 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. It is of logistic importance because each year’s journey is a gamble on whether people will be able to get home and then back again. And it is emotional on an epic scale matched mainly by visits during wartime. Will the family still be there? Will my child still know me? Will my parents think I have changed, or gone wrong?
There are other complications too, affecting China’s drive to modernize and the role of simple physical movement in that process. They involve the special role of western China, especially the autonomous regions of Tibet and Xinjiang, and the uneasy balance between the Chinese military—weak in international terms, strong as an internal factor—in allowing the country to move ever more freely.
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An Airport in the Wilderness
“The emperor is far away …”
One day in June 2009, I had a longer discussion than normal with a taxi driver outside our apartment building in Beijing. I was trying to convince him, in Chinese, that when I said I wanted to go to “the airport”—
dao jichang qu
—I wasn’t talking about the main international airport, Beijing Capital, where every foreigner he’d ever carried had wanted to go.
Instead my destination was the small, almost rural-seeming Nanyuan Airport on the south edge of town. Pedal-cart drivers lazed outside under trees along the narrow road into this airport, waiting for customers but not appearing to expect any very soon. Passengers who were departing went from the terminal to their airplanes not through enclosed jetways but across the open tarmac, which was edged with trees. From Nanyuan, one of China’s odder minor airlines—China United, owned and operated by the People’s Liberation Army—ran flights to small inland destinations, in my case, the relatively large inland destination of Xi’an.
This would be my first-ever trip on China United Airlines, which, as with many other domestic carriers, filled its seats up from the back. There were only thirty or so passengers for a Boeing 737 that could have held more than a hundred, and we were sent back to fully occupy the last few rows in the plane.
(Once the door was closed, the passengers scrambled around to take empty seats.) I stayed in the rear, in a window seat, and settled down to watch the scenery on the two-hour flight to Xi’an.
To the world, Xi’an is, of course, known for its army of terra-cotta warriors. In China, it is known as the capital of the arid western coal-and-farming province of Shaanxi (not to be confused with the neighboring and also coal-producing province of Shanxi—the difference is more obvious in Chinese:
versus
) and as the modern site of the ancient Imperial capital of Chang’an. Many of the city walls from the Imperial era remain, enclosing among other features a mosque in the city’s Muslim quarter.
To the aspiring Chinese aviation community, Xi’an is known as one of several potential seats of a new aerospace boom, a combination of Kitty Hawk, Aspen, Teterboro Airport, and Everett, Washington: a place where important things will be born; where elite travelers will fly in on holiday; where business jets will congregate; and where airliners will be built for customers around the world. Each of these goals reflects an aspect of the ones that China has set for its development. The question is how did they all strangely come together in the place on the far outskirts of Xi’an called the Luyanghu Integrated General Aviation Development Zone, near a provincial center called Weinan?
The trip of a number of international aviation enthusiasts to Weinan was part of the Fourth Annual China General Aviation Forum. I had come along at the invitation of its organizer and impresario, Francis Chao, a Taiwanese-American in his fifties.
Around the beginning of the twenty-first century, Chao had begun to think that sooner or later a business-aviation boom was destined to come to China. The people then just starting to consider BMWs and Mercedeses would eventually be looking to Lamborghinis and Bentleys, and after that to Gulfstreams and Learjets and fancy personal helicopters from brands like Robinson. As China’s road and rail networks improved, so eventually would its airports and aviation infrastructure. Chao had worked in the 1990s as a contractor for the U.S. Department of Defense, the FAA, and other federal agencies, providing interpretation and other support in their dealings with China and Taiwan. Early in the George W. Bush Administration, when a People’s Liberation Army naval fighter plane collided with a U.S. Navy EP-3 electronic-surveillance plane over the South China Sea, he worked with the Pentagon negotiating team to calm a potentially volatile confrontation. A few months earlier, in a project for the FAA, he escorted a delegation from the CAAC to the AirVenture summer air show in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, so they could have a sense of the scale of general aviation in the United States and its potential for China. He sensed the potential too and decided that he could play a role in connecting an emerging aviation community in China with its established counterparts in the United States. The connections would include commercial ties, since many of the goods and services that Chinese customers would be looking for would come, at least initially, from companies and experts in the United States.
The first time I met Chao, at an aerospace expo in Beijing in the fall of 2006, I didn’t fully appreciate how emblematic his chosen role was. 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. On one side are international companies large or small who sense that somehow they have to “get into” China because of its vast potential. On the other side are the complexities, confusions, and constant changes of customers and operating rules on the Chinese side.
The people who know how to make the connections are enormously valuable—and a large number of them, for natural linguistic and cultural reasons, are ethnically Chinese people like Chao from mainland China or Taiwan who had immigrated to or studied in the West. The middleman role naturally attracts its share of charlatans, and foreign companies often have to rely on hunch or trial and error to determine whether someone who is good at languages and claims to “understand the real China” really has any business skills or knows what he is talking about.