2 * Getting Off the Ground
Starting out far behind
A man who had served in the People’s Liberation Army Air Force before immigrating to the United States in the 1980s told me the following story of China’s introduction to the world of international aviation.
As Henry Kissinger planned his secret trip to China in 1971, airport officials in Beijing were concerned. Kissinger would be arriving on a Boeing 707 operated by Pakistan International Airlines. To conceal the fact that he was going to China, Kissinger had feigned illness while on a trip to Pakistan, which explained his absence from official functions there. For extra security he traveled from Islamabad to Beijing not in an American-government aircraft but one from PIA, which had operated scheduled service to China since the mid-1960s.
At the time, the 707 was one of the most recognizable aircraft in the world. It was the airplane that more than any other had made jet age intercontinental travel feasible in the 1960s. An Air Force version of the 707 also served in those days as Air Force One, as it had during one mission that commanded attention around the world: bringing John F. Kennedy’s body back from Dallas in 1963.1
But 707s did not normally fly into the People’s Republic of China. Its airports were closed to most Western airlines, and its own commercial and military fleets used mainly Soviet-model airplanes. Would it have the right equipment to handle and service the plane? At an even more basic and potentially embarrassing level, how was Kissinger supposed to get from the airplane onto the ground? When the 707’s doors opened, they would be some twenty feet above the runway, and at a different height from the Soviet-made planes. Would the VIP passengers have to jump, or climb, to reach the movable stairways the Beijing authorities already had on hand?
According to my friend from the PLA Air Force, the Chinese officials did not want to buy or borrow a standard airport staircase from a Western supplier—such was their sensitivity about revelations of their technological isolation. Instead they built their own in a rush, using pictures and published specs of the 707. When Kissinger’s plane arrived they rolled out the staircase as if it were the most natural thing for them to be prepared for any sort of international aircraft.
Forty years later, China’s President Hu Jintao took a nonstop flight from Beijing’s lavishly modernized Capital Airport to Andrews Air Force Base, outside Washington, for his series of meetings with President Obama. He also traveled in a very familiar Boeing plane, the latest extended-range version of the 747, painted with the livery of Air China. There was an image of a big red Chinese flag near the nose of the plane, and, next to it, the logo of Star Alliance, which linked Air China with United, Lufthansa, ANA (All Nippon Airways), Air New Zealand, and many other international airlines.
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.
Elements of the plan
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:
• The growth of this industry has been both guided and uncontrolled, at times chaotic and even outside the law.
• It has depended upon efforts by both the country’s military and its civilian organizations, both government and business, both enormous state-owned entities and tiny private firms, both central-government guidance and entrepreneurial efforts from provinces and towns.
• It has relied on and been shaped by foreigners, especially Americans, to a degree that few people inside or outside China recognize. Indeed, the transformation of China’s airline systems from one of the most dangerous in the world to one of the safest is largely a testament to underpublicized but highly important efforts by Chinese and American companies and governments.
• Its successes and its impending limitations reflect the same schisms within China’s political leadership and tensions between central guidance and regional guidance that appear in many other areas.
• Its efforts to build a modern air-travel system, in parallel with the road-building and track-laying whose effects are so obvious across China, reflect the central government’s sharp awareness of a challenge very similar to the one that propelled American development through the United States’s first century or so as a nation: the need to create physical connections across a continental nation of great geographic, cultural, and economic extremes.2
Here is how they started and how they plan to bring it about.
The Chinese pioneers
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.4
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,5 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.
Mao’s China takes to the skies, barely
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.
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 2010.7 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.
How other countries did it
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.8 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,9 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.
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.”11 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.
Why China did it differently
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.
Even the training of pilots was diversified. In Europe and North America, the military directly trained a number of pilots (many of whom eventually left to join the civilian airline fleets), and specialized “aeronautical universities”12 were created to train others, along with mechanics and air-traffic controllers. By the 1950s, the United States had built more than four thousand airfields, large and small, across the country. Some were military bases, some big commercial airports, some rural or private landing strips; some were civic booster projects to attract businesses to remote communities or make it easier for residents to reach big-city services. There were a lot of them, and the great majority offered small flying schools or repair shops too. Only a handful have been built since then, the most notable being Washington Dulles in the 1960s, Dallas–Fort Worth in the 1970s, and Denver International in the 1990s. Meanwhile hundreds of smaller airports have been closed.
Thus, in most of the flying world, the military propelled a business that civilians had started and still dominated. China’s reentry into aviation in the communist era was under military control from the start. There was practically no tradition of civil aviation in China. At the dawn of World War II and again for the Korean War and Vietnam, the United States could call on hundreds of thousands of young men and women who had been exposed to airplanes or air shows in some way. They had no counterpart in China, and don’t even now. If you look at airspace maps of Europe or North America, the portions that are still controlled by the military are relatively small (except over the desert areas of Nevada, Utah, and Southern California, where they are very large). All the rest is for business, recreational, or commercial-airline use. If you look at an airspace map of China—well, that is an achievement in itself, since generally they have been controlled by the military and are viewed as too sensitive for foreigners to see. But if you could look, you’d see at once that the areas not controlled by the military are relatively thin, crabbed corridors connecting the biggest cities. All the rest has been off limits to everyone except the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).
There was another important structural difference in China’s approach: the centralized power of the Civil Aviation Administration of China, or CAAC, which played nearly all of the varied and sometimes conflicting roles that Western countries kept carefully divided among different official and agencies. In China, the reins were in one set of hands.
The CAAC decided—with the military—what kind of airplanes could and should be built. (In the United States, this “certificating” role lies with the FAA, and the aircraft companies work with their customers, the airlines, to decide what kinds of planes to build.) CAAC and military engineers and designers planned the planes. CAAC inspectors certified the designs as being “airworthy.” Its factories built the planes and set the internal “transfer prices” at which they would be sold—to the flight-operations divisions of the CAAC.
The CAAC’s flight schools trained the pilots. Its airline division set the routes, sold the tickets, and trained the flight attendants for the trips. Its maintenance people took care of the planes between flights. Its airport operators built and ran the airports. Its fuel division kept the supply tanks full. When there was a crash, as happened very often, its safety division would try to find out what had happened. It ran the airports, it ran the airlines, it ran the regulatory functions. It was like one huge military operation, with the inefficiencies that arise in such a structure.
Through the beginning of the reform era, the Chinese system had airplanes that were mainly built and designed by the military as knockoffs of Soviet and occasionally Western models; it had a rudimentary system of internal routes; its planes did not undertake long overseas routes, because as the Australian analyst Mark Dougan pointed out13 in his history of Chinese aviation, the planes couldn’t make overseas trips without refueling, and the very act of stopping at refueling sites would have constituted a humiliating display of how poor the equipment was. The heavy industrial base that would be involved in aviation was in the protected hinterland, rather than on the coast, where the big market reforms would start; the whole operation was run by a central ministry, which itself was answerable to the military; and this was part of China’s presentation of itself to the world.
And the airplanes …