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China Airborne

Name: China Airborne
Author: James Fallows
ISBN: 9780375422119

by James Fallows

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Overview

More than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. Chinese airlines expect to triple their fleet size over the next decade and will account for the fastest-growing market for Boeing and Airbus. But the Chinese are determined to be more than customers. In 2011, China announced its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. Its goal is to produce the Boeings and Airbuses of the future. Toward that end, it acquired two American companies: Cirrus Aviation, maker of the world’s most popular small propeller plane, and Teledyne Continental, which produces the engines for Cirrus and other small aircraft.

In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of this project and explains why it is a crucial test case for China’s hopes for modernization and innovation in other industries. He makes clear how it stands to catalyze the nation’s hyper-growth and hyper- urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America’s transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi’an, home to more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China’s pursuit of aerospace supremacy. He concludes by examining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and the rest of the world—and the right ways to understand it.

About the Author, James Fallows

James Fallows is a national correspondent for The Atlantic. He has reported from around the world and has worked in software design at Microsoft, as the editor of U.S. News & World Report, and as a speechwriter for President Jimmy Carter. He is currently a news analyst for NPR’s Weekend All Things Considered and a visiting professor at the University of Sydney.

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Editorials

Publishers Weekly

Journalist Fallows, a national correspondent for the Atlantic, takes us through China’s emerging role in the aviation industry—its past, and its developing future. Despite its ample historical facts and descriptions, Fallows keeps the reader engaged by weaving personal stories and lively personalities into his depiction of the changing aerospace landscape. He tackles technical facets and political obstacles that China faces as it tries to become an aerospace power, but for Fallows, aviation is just a prime example of larger dynamics in the Chinese economy: “balance and tension.” All of this coalesces into a picture of China as a country propelling forward, “addicted to growth.” Whether readers have an interest in aviation or China’s role in the global economy, Fallows’s book makes for an intriguing read, looking at both sides of the picture: reasons for why China might succeed, as well as those for why the country might struggle. Agent: Wendy Weil Agency. (May)

Kirkus Reviews

In this natural follow-up to Postcards from Tomorrow Square: Reports from China (2008), Atlantic correspondent Fallows analyzes the problems and promises of China's economic development through an examination of the efforts to create a world-class aerospace industry. With its unprecedented manufacturing prowess, China has become a world economic power. But how real and sustainable is the development? The test, writes the author, is how well China succeeds in its current effort to build an aerospace industry, to which the Chinese government has pledged $230 billion. "If China can succeed fully in aerospace," writes Fallows, "then in principle there is very little it cannot do." However, this is no easy task. It is one thing to assemble iPhones, quite another to build an industry of the complexity of aerospace. Fallows ably guides readers through this complexity: developing internationally recognized standards of safety and inspection, ensuring adequate air space above China for a busy airline industry, developing and manufacturing airplanes, and their millions of components, that can compete with established manufacturers such as Boeing and Airbus. In this effort, Fallows sees both the broad positive and negative features of Chinese society. While China's economy at its best is marked by an anarchic spontaneity of entrepreneurial energy, this energy is often checked by a state apparatus obsessed with monitoring and controlling it. If the government will not allow open Internet access, it cannot easily open up the skies to commercial flights. The Chinese military owns the country's airspace, with only a few narrow corridors open for commercial flights into China's major cities. With precise yet accessible language, Fallows discusses a variety of contradictions in China, revealing much more about it than its prospects as an aerospace power. An enjoyable, important update on an enigmatic economic giant.