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:

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.

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.