China Airborne (7 page)

Kissinger’s trip underscored China’s apartness from the world; Hu Jintao’s its thorough connectedness. And one of the few elements that remained constant through this forty-year span—that officials of each government traveled to the other’s capital on U.S.-made Boeing planes—illustrated another aspect
of China’s evolution and of the United States–Chinese interaction: the symbolic and also practical significance of American dominance in aerospace and aviation, a field in which China had ambitions but few achievements.

With the unveiling of its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, and presumably with the plans that would come after it, the Chinese government announced its intention to close that gap, much as it had previously done in automobile production, electronics, clean-energy technology, and so many other areas. At the Asian Aerospace Expo in Hong Kong in 2011, COMAC—the Commercial Aircraft Group of China, the country’s intended long-term rival to Boeing and Airbus—presented a huge mock-up of the C919 commercial airliner whose development was then under way, as a prelude to a similar presentation a few months later at the Paris Air Show.

When visitors walked into a full-scale model of a section of the cabin’s interior in Hong Kong, they could watch video renderings of a future in which Chinese-made airliners were taking passengers and potentates all around the world. They reminded me powerfully of the videos I had seen the previous year at the Shanghai World Expo, or that Americans who attended the New York World’s Fair of 1964 would have seen there. By the comparison I mean not that the Chinese presentations were out of date but that they were optimistic. The theme of their “let’s imagine!” videos was how much brighter, cleaner, and in all ways better a futuristic existence will be. I hope that someday the video that GM China produced for its Shanghai Expo pavilion will be taken on a world tour. It conveyed the same sense of futuristic marvel that I recall from visiting Disney’s Tomorrowland as a schoolchild in the early 1960s. A similar spirit guides the future-of-Chinese-aviation videos, with their depictions of suave Chinese businesspeople and happy Chinese
families relaxing, enjoying the flight, and looking confidently toward what awaits them at their destination.

That’s the goal—with airplanes, and with so many other aspects of life in China now. It is hard for rich-country residents—Europeans, North Americans, Japanese, Australians, New Zealanders, and others—to contemplate such simple joy in material progress without a slight mocking smile. For them, prosperity, in an overall sense, has been thoroughly taken for granted, for a long time, and the uneven and imperfect blessings of progress are well understood. But at least for people over the age of thirty in China, the excitement about modernization is still (largely) genuine and sincere.

China’s progress from the earliest days of aviation to its current aspirations to create the next Boeing resemble patterns in other areas where it has rushed to modernize. The main themes of that progress are:

Here is how they started and how they plan to bring it about.

In the headquarters of Boeing China’s offices, in the Pacific Plaza complex off the Third Ring Road on the east side of Beijing, there is a special small shrine to a Chinese technologist named Wong Tsu. Wong was born in Beijing in 1893. He was ten years old when the Wright brothers made their first flight at Kitty Hawk, and not yet twenty when the Qing Dynasty, which had ruled China since the 1640s, collapsed under its last sovereign, the “boy emperor” Puyi. When Wong Tsu was sixteen, during the turbulent final stages of the Qing decline, he was sent as a naval cadet to England for training—and then, as the regime fully collapsed, he went on to MIT, where he became a student in the very first aeronautical engineering program in the United States.
³

In 1916, as the Great War raged in Europe and as the forces of Sun Yat-sen were taking over China, Wong received his degree from MIT and also learned to fly, in a seaplane school in Buffalo. In that same year, Bill Boeing, a thirty-five-year-old Yale man who had worked in the timber industry, started an airplane company in Seattle. Wong moved out to Seattle and joined him as the new Boeing company’s first chief engineer.

In the shrine at the Beijing office, along with portraits of Wong and testimonials about his work, there is a dramatic black-and-white photo taken in 1919 of Bill Boeing and Eddie Hubbard, one of the company’s first pilots. They are wearing the jackets and leather flying helmets we associate with photos of Lindbergh or Earhart; they are standing on a Puget Sound dock, with water lapping up just behind them. In one hand, Boeing is holding a canvas sack of mail. This was, in fact, the first international airmail shipment ever carried to the United States, which Boeing and Hubbard had brought from Vancouver, British Columbia, to Seattle. Behind them in the picture, on pontoons, is Boeing’s hugely important Model C seaplane, which was designed by Wong Tsu.

For Beijing, the Model C was a commercial breakthrough. It was the first plane that Boeing had sold to the U.S. military, and also the first to be used in America for postal delivery.

Military purchases and airmail contracts were how early airlines—and aircraft companies—paid for their development. From Bill Boeing onward, the company’s chief executives through the decades were careful to note that without Wong Tsu’s efforts, especially with the Model C, the company might not have survived the early years to become the dominant world aircraft manufacturer.
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In 1918, Wong Tsu returned to China, and over the next two decades he started to build an aviation industry there, in
close cooperation with his former colleagues in England and the United States. As World War I was nearing its end, he founded the Mah-Wei aircraft company in southern coastal China, not far from the site where the computer-maker Dell now has its Chinese manufacturing center. There he oversaw production of the first genuinely Chinese airplane, the Sea Eagle, soon followed by the River Bird.

In the late 1920s, Wong worked with a former partner from Boeing to found the Chinese National Aviation Corporation, in Shanghai. He became a colonel in the Chinese Army; he oversaw the construction of China’s first military-aircraft fleet. When the Japanese invaded, he went inland, first to Wuhan, along the Yangtze, and then to Kunming, in far southwestern Yunnan province, bordering Burma. During World War II, when Chinese factories were essentially cut off from international supplies, he designed all-bamboo gliders for carrying troops.

But as civil war spread across the country after Japan’s surrender, Wong Tsu fled to Taiwan rather than to stay for life under Mao and the communists. He spent the next twenty years, until his death in 1965, teaching aeronautical engineering at a Taiwanese university rather than building airplanes.

Overall he fared much better than the other most famous father of Chinese aviation. This was Feng Ru,
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an immigrant from Guangzhou in southern China who was known as Joe Fung, or Joe Fong in the Chinatowns of Oakland and San Francisco at the beginning of the twentieth century.

On arrival in the United States, Feng had been dazzled by its technological modernity. He traveled around the country, working in machine shops and shipyards to learn skills he could eventually take back to China.
⁶
As an article in
Air & Space
magazine put it, “Feng became well known for developing alternate
versions of the water pump, the generator, the telephone, and the wireless telegraph, some of which were used by San Francisco’s Chinese businessmen.” After the Wright brothers’ flight, as part of the general romance of flight that swept the world, Feng Ru became obsessed with aviation, produced Chinese translations of reports on the Wright brothers and their competitors, and decided to create an airplane of his own.

He worked in secret, in a tiny room that he grandly called the Guangdong Aircraft Factory; he ordered parts from a variety of manufacturers so that no one supplier would be wise to his plans. By 1909, he had designed and built a biplane that, on September 21, he successfully kept aloft for more than twenty minutes in the hills outside Oakland. For a while his work caused an international sensation, which included coverage in
The New York Times
and a congratulatory message from Sun Yat-sen. He returned to China but was killed, at age twenty-nine, in a crash in 1912 while performing before a crowd of a thousand in Guangzhou. Sun Yat-sen decreed that Feng’s grave should carry the words “Chinese Aviation Pioneer.”

During the “anti-Japanese war,” which is the way Chinese histories refer to the entire period from 1937 to 1945, Chinese forces had essentially no air power of their own. Japanese bombers struck Chinese cities at will during a series of invasions into Manchuria in the north and then Shanghai and eventually Hong Kong in the south. Once the United States entered the war, its main aerial involvement within China was via convoys that went over the hump of the Himalayas, from India and Burma, to deliver armaments and supplies to Chinese forces in Kunming and Chongqing (then referred to as Chungking) and to fight Japanese forces there. More than sixty years after the war’s end, in the far southern reaches of Yunnan province that border Burma and India, my wife and I saw the remnants of
the radio stations that had guided U.S. aviators over the Hump. This was in a small town near Dali named Xizhou, which happened also to be where the teachers of Yale’s China program had fled when Japanese troops overran Chongqing.

When the civil war was over and the communists were in charge, China had only the most rudimentary aviation industry or establishment. Some two hundred airplanes total were left after more than a decade of war—fewer than one day’s production for the United States during its World War II peak. This fleet was replenished briefly, with Soviet help, to challenge the American forces during the Korean War. But the industry that emerged from the era of Soviet cooperation, through the 1950s until the split between Mao and Khrushchev in the early 1960s, was autarkic and out of date.

For the country as a whole, the most destructive phase of Mao’s economic mismanagement was of course the Great Leap Forward of the mid- and late 1950s. Tens of millions of people starved to death in the countryside—more than the number of Soviet soldiers and civilians who perished during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis, more than the number of European Jews slaughtered during the Holocaust—as mass levees of manpower took workers from tending the farms to working in fanciful village-level steel mills. When it came to genuine factories, those still producing the nation’s trucks and tractors and locomotives and few airplanes, Mao developed a strategy known as
sanxian
(
), or “third line,” as in “third line of defense.” Factories were moved away from the coastline and distributed through interior provinces, often nestled
into remote valleys in the middle of mountain ranges. Thus an attacking enemy—presumably the United States, but after the Sino-Soviet breakup the Soviet Union became another perceived threat—would face the daunting prospect of fighting a land war through the center of China if it contemplated destroying these facilities. Even if attacking by air, it would have to send its bombers on long, difficult missions to reach the factories, rather than attacking them where they had been, in obvious concentrations near the coast at Guangzhou in the south, Tianjin in the north, or Shanghai in between. One of the predictable surprises of traveling though today’s Chinese countryside is coming across steel mills, engine works, and other derelict-looking heavy industrial sites far from major cities—not that the major cities are short on them. The nationwide dispersal of industries, while intended as a national security measure and as a way of bringing opportunity to the hinterland, also meant that areas of rural China you might expect to be “pristine” now can have as heavy a pall of industrial smoke as the biggest cities do.