China Airborne (8 page)

As applied to aviation, the dispersal plan led to small factories all over the country, plus a major concentration of airplane factories and related plants outside the famous central city of Xi’an. In Chinese history, the city was known as Chang’an—
, “long peace”—and was a capital through ten dynasties in Chinese antiquity. Its modern name, Xi’an, or
, means “western peace.” In modern history, Xi’an is known for the thousands of terra-cotta warriors on its outskirts. But among its distinctions, from the
sanxian
perspective, is that among China’s major cities it was the one farthest from any land border, the counterpart to a site in Kansas or Nebraska in the United States, and thus theoretically safest from aerial attack. (And of course during the Cold War the United States based much of its nuclear missile and bomber fleets in the Great Plains, for similar
reasons.) 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.

The Chinese industrial sector as a whole was inefficient and poorly designed, by world standards, during the Mao era, and the same was true of its aerospace factories. “A major structural weakness and a legacy of the Maoist past is the widespread duplication and balkanization of industrial and research facilities,” Tai Ming Cheung, of the University of California, San Diego, said at a U.S. government hearing on “China’s Emergent Military Aerospace and Commercial Aviation Capabilities” in 2010.
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He pointed out that technically backward, underfunded Mao-era China had well over a hundred separate airplane-related factories or research centers all across the country. Far from pooling their limited resources or coordinating their efforts, they were active rivals for funding and prominence, meaning that together they made even less progress than they might otherwise have done.

Until the late 1970s, the operations of China’s domestic airlines were similarly state-controlled and sheltered from market forces. The few airlines in existence sent the few airplanes they had to a few cities along a limited number of state-mandated routes. The few passengers were not allowed to buy tickets unless they had authorization from their
danwei
, the Party-led business or work unit that controlled most aspects of their lives. During the most totalitarian periods under Mao, authorization from the
danwei
was needed before members could marry, have children, consider different jobs, or travel inside or (rarely) outside the country. The whole air-travel network operated more or less the way military air travel does in the United States, without the efficiency or the scale. Thus its transformation into
a system that had to compete with, or at least coexist alongside, established international carriers, while expanding domestically on pace with the new era’s growth, was as difficult as for any other Chinese industry—if not more so.

Economists use the term “path dependence” to convey the simple idea that choices you made yesterday affect the choices available to you today. It is easier for the Seattle area to maintain an aerospace industry, since one has grown there over the past century, than it would be for New Orleans to start one from scratch. The same applies to New York with finance, greater Boston with higher education and medicine, Houston with the energy business, and so on. Nations, regions, cities, and companies can of course change from one path to another—that’s why we speak of historic rises and declines. 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.

Through the half century after the Wright brothers’ first flight, aerospace developments in most of the world followed a path that was more or less similar from one country to another, but quite different from what China is attempting now. We naturally think of aviation as being a huge, concentrated enterprise that only a few global megafirms can afford to compete in. But in its early days, airplane inventors, designers, and entrepreneurs were at work on almost every continent, including those who started their own small companies before Bill Boeing did.

Many countries had nascent aerospace tech-business centers. Apart from the United States, they included Australia, Brazil,
Canada, Czechoslovakia, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, Sweden, and more. In most of them the sequence that eventually led to an aircraft industry was more or less the same. First there was the rapid spread of a hobbyist approach to aviation, typified by the barnstorming culture of daredevil pilots and air shows. Everything about flying in those days was hazardous. Orville Wright himself was nearly killed in a crash at Fort Myer, just outside Washington, D.C., in 1908, when the Wrights were demonstrating their airplane to the U.S. Army in order to qualify for military contracts. His passenger, the young army lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, who died in the crash and was later buried in Arlington Cemetery, is generally considered to be the first person ever killed in an airplane accident.

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 sagas of those early decades are very much like recent accounts of the evolution of computer and Internet start-ups: Entrepreneurs across the United States, Europe, South America, and elsewhere founded their small aircraft companies in a warehouse or a barn. Most failed in the short run—or, if they survived, were taken over by competitors. Even so, to a large extent these companies, reflecting their founders’ energies and ambitions, managed to push the technological or commercial frontiers of aerospace at least slightly forward while they were around. Although Bill Boeing’s name is now the best known of those early innovators, through aviation’s early decades he was a small player in a field that attracted people already well known for other successes. Henry Ford branched out from cars to make the popular Ford Tri-Motor, which was a refinement
of a Fokker design from the Netherlands. During World War II, Ford’s Willow Run assembly plant became the world’s largest aircraft-production facility. Howard Hughes, of course, built his
Spruce Goose
. Geoffrey De Havilland founded and led what became Britain’s most important aircraft company. Ryan, Northrop, Grumman, Sikorsky, McDonnell, Douglas, Fairchild, Vought, Curtiss, and many others had names that for a while were synonymous with aircraft—as did the Loughead brothers of California, with their Lockheed company.
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They had their counterparts across Europe. In the Soviet Union, where the state made all the airplanes, the famous names were of the designers: Antonov, Ilyushin, Tupolev.

Aircraft made their combat debut during World War I. Despite the celebrated exploits of aces like Germany’s Manfred von Richthofen, known as the Red Baron, and America’s Eddie Rickenbacker, air power was not a decisive factor for either side. Yet even by that stage military contracts had become crucial to keeping the Wrights and their emulators in business. The Navy ordered fifty of Boeing’s Model-C planes, the ones designed by Wong Tsu, which represented the new Boeing company’s most important early sale. In the 1930s, the first instrument navigation systems were developed in the United States and England. These allowed pilots to keep airplanes under control and on course even when flying through clouds or at night, rather than crashing as they frequently did if trying to “fly blind”—without instrument guidance. In the last two years of World War II, the first practical jet engines were developed, by German engineers who produced the Messerschmitt 262. The combination of instrument guidance and jet propulsion gave aircraft lasting military and economic importance. Part of America’s “arsenal of democracy”—a surge in the building of military matériel that wore down the Axis powers—was its increase from producing
four thousand airplanes in 1940 to a hundred thousand in 1944.

A nationwide airmail network was in place across the United States by the mid-1920s,
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with mail sacks and small parcels carried on airplanes that the U.S. Post Office owned and operated. In 1925, the right to carry mail was transferred to commercial carriers, where it formed a significant stream of dependable income as these carriers began building passenger-travel networks. Two years later, Charles Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic increased international excitement about aviation so much that, within the two years after that, worldwide investment in airplane and airline companies tripled. Even through the Depression of the 1930s, the improvements in speed, safety, and comfort of passenger planes made the airlines one of the few growing industries in the United States. It was during the 1930s that coast-to-coast travel first became faster by air than by rail. After this came the airpower-heavy combat of World War II; the commercialization of jet travel in the late 1950s; and the subsequent revolution in business, leisure, and family patterns around the world made possible by ever-safer and, for a while, ever-cheaper airline travel.

While so much was happening in so many parts of the world in the decades after the Wright brothers’ flight, almost nothing of the sort was happening in China. 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.
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Despite the efforts of people like Wong Tsu and Feng Ru, it fell steadily further behind.

The first airplane flew in China in 1909, only six years after
the Wright brothers’ first flight at Kitty Hawk, but the gap between China’s standards and the world’s widened from that point on. The war, revolution, and tumult of the first half of the twentieth century made it hard for Chinese authorities to maintain roads and railroads, let alone invest in a new air-travel infrastructure. In principle, for an underdeveloped country with difficult geography, creating a network of airports can be a more economical and attractive way to link far-flung regions than trying to build railroads. To get supplies or travelers to Tibet or Qinghai, you need only pave a few square miles for airports and their support structures, not lay thousands of miles of track.

But building even those few airports was hard, given the chaos and poverty of the country at that state of development. As the main academic historian of Chinese aviation during this period has pointed out, aircraft need their own sort of land support, “a system of terrestrial navigation and communication facilities spread out along the route to provide navigation assistance and weather reports.”
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No one had the time, patience, money, or security to produce these systems in China. By the time of the Japanese invasion in the 1930s and China’s subsequent engulfment in revolution and war, there were only a handful of passenger flights operating in the country, and most were run by foreign companies like Pan Am.

By the time Mao’s government turned its attention to aviation, in the late 1950s, the path dependence of China’s transportation system made its choices different from those available in most other countries.

In Europe as in the United States, private flying, by hobbyists, tinkerers, and adventurers, came first. By the time of World War I the military was emerging as an important source of funding; and through the 1920s there was a diverse and quickly changing ecology of people who one way or another made a living through aviation: amateur flyers, crop dusters and air-show performers, military flyers, government airmail systems, and the early private airlines (an important one of which, United Air Lines, was spun off from Boeing in the 1930s).

The regulatory system in North America and Europe was also diverse, and reflected a belief in a checks-and-balances system with divided responsibilities and powers. In the United States, a Civil Aeronautics Board was established to oversee—and promote—the business of air travel and to regulate routes and fares; the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) worked on improving safety and procedures, while also working on navigation systems and weather forecasting; what was eventually the National Transportation Safety Board had an independent role in investigating crashes; and NASA, the military, and other groups played significant parts as sponsors. As the country with the largest and fastest-growing aerospace business, the United States also set an international lead in how regulatory systems should be designed.