James Fallows - China Airborne

Copyright 2012 by James Fallows

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Fallows, James M.
China airborne / James Fallows.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-90740-0
1. AeronauticsChina 2. Aeronautics, CommercialChina. 3. Aerospace industriesChina. 4. ChinaEconomic conditions2000 I. Title.
TL527.C5F35 2012 387.70951dc23 2011046805

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Jacket image from a painting by Yu Zhenli, May 1976. (altered detail).
Jacket design by Peter Mendelsund

v3.1

For Lincoln Caplan and Eric Redman

This book is dedicated with gratitude to Lincoln Caplan and Eric Redman, friends and advisers through most of my life, who during the evolution of this book have once again been generous and perceptive sources of the right mixture of criticism, support, humor, and inspiration. I am fortunate to have them as friends and to know I can rely on them, as I have done very often over the years.

The Atlantic has been my professional home since the late 1970s; through that time I have grown only more appreciative of its journalistic values and its internal culture. David Bradley and Justin Smith have made one of Americas oldest literary institutions into a viable modern business. James Bennet and Scott Stossel have guided it (and me) editorially, and were generous in letting me take time to work on this book during an already short-staffed period for the magazine. Before them I worked closely with a sequence of wonderful Atlantic editors: Robert Manning, William Whitworth, Michael Kelly, and Cullen Murphy. In recent years I have worked directly with Corby Kummer, Sue Parilla, Marge duMond, and Janice Cane on most of my articles for the magazine, including during my years in China, and with Bob Cohn and John Gould for items on the Atlantics web site. As with previous books, I really should list every name on the magazines masthead, but I will mention those I worked with most often during the time I was in China: Nicole Allan, Marc Ambinder, Lindsey Bahr, Jennifer Barnett, Ashley Bolding, Ben Bradley, Lucy Byrd, Ben Carlson, Steve Clemons, Cotton Codinha, Abby Cutler, Stacey Pavesi-Debre, Betsy Ebersole, Geoffrey Gagnon, James Gibney, Jeffrey Goldberg, Chris Good, Bruce Gottlieb, John Gould, Joshua Green, Jennie Rothenberg Gritz, Alisha Hathawa, Carl Holscher, Shana Keefe, Elizabeth Keffer, Aaron Kenner, Jay Lauf, Clair Lorell, Alexis Madrigal, Megan McGuinn, Justin Miller, Chris Orr, Don Peck, Lyndsay Polloway, Michael Proffitt, Natalie Raabe, Yvonne Rolzhausen, Emmy Scandling, Suzanne Smalley, Ellie Smith, Maria Streshinksy, John Fox Sullivan, Derek Thompson, Jason Treat, and Robert Vare.

Since its founding in 2008, the United States Studies Centre at the University of Sydney has been an additional, welcome professional home. I thank Geoffrey Garrett for building and leading the Centre and making me a part of it; his colleagues Sean Gallagher, Nina Fudala, Craig Purcell, Will Turner, Amber DSouza, and others; and Joe Skrzynski for his hospitality in Sydney. My other long-term unofficial journalistic home has been National Public Radio, and in particular I thank Guy Raz, Phil Harrell, Matthew Martinez, Rick Holter, Daniel Shukhin, and others with whom I have enjoyed working on the Weekend All Things Considered program.

Wendy Weil, my literary agent for more than thirty years, represented me with skill, toughness, understanding, and tact on this project as she has on seven previous ones. At Pantheon, my publisher for most of the past twenty years, I am grateful for the insight and guidance of my editor, Dan Frank, who originally had the idea for this book and saw it through several stages of evolution, and for the patience, flexibility, and help of Jill Verrillo, Altie Karper, and Josie Kals.

I have been fascinated by and involved with Cirrus aircraft since the late 1990s, when I first wrote about the start-up Cirrus Design company for The New York Times Magazine. Soon thereafter I bought a Cirrus SR20 and flew it frequently around America and Canada, before selling it when I moved to China in 2006. This book describes the important roles played in China by first Peter Claeys and then Paul Fiduccia of Cirrus. I am grateful to both of them for their time and trust. Also I thank Ian Bentley, Gary Black, Scott Jiang, and Gary Poelma, now of Cirrus. Plus, in other roles in aviation, Alan Klapmeier, Kate Dougherty, Bruce Holmes, and Lane Wallace; and Michael Klein, Boni Caldeira, and Steve Musgrove of Open Air, with whose guidance I have bought and happily flown a used Cirrus SR22. For this book I should also acknowledge my original flight instructors, Ken Michaelson and Chris Baker. Everyone who follows aviation has learned from the insights of Richard Aboulafia, of the Teal Group. I am grateful for all the time he spent helping me clarify the arguments in this book.

In and around China, for friendship, advice, and help of different sorts between 2006 and 2012, I would like to thank: Andy Andreasen, Fr. Ron Anton, Phil Baker, Andrew Batson, Bing and Daniel Bell, Dominic Barton, Richard Burger, Liam Casey, Liz Rawlings and Steve Chalupsky, Francis Chao, Dovar Chen, Patrick Chovanec, Ella Chou, Chen Xin, Duncan Clark, Melanie and Eliot Cutler, Simon Elegant, Pamela Leonard and John Flower, Rebecca Frankel and Mike, Julio Friedmann, Gao Yuanyang, Jeremy Goldkorn, Jim Gradoville, Paola Sada and Jorge Guajardo, York-chi and Stephen Harder, Guo Liang, Hu Shuli, Andrew Houghton, Andrew Hutson, Ann and Ken Jarrett, Jeremiah Jenne, Isaac Kardon, Kent Kedl, Elizabeth Knup, Kaiser Kuo, Showkee Lee and her family, Kai-fu Lee, Yumin Liang, Mei Fong and Andrew Lih, Rebecca and Kenny Lin, Jeanee and Brian Linden, Barbara and Robert Liotta, River Lu, Damien Ma, Jim McGregor, Kirk McDonald, Adam Minter, Russell Leigh Moses, John Northen, Evan Osnos, Herve Pauze and Lisa Robins, Minxin Pei, Michael Pettis, Fr. Roberto Ribeiro, Sidney Rittenberg, Robin Bordie and Andy Rothman, Bob Schapiro, Rita OConnor and Ted Schell, Baifang and Orville Schell, Shi Hongshen, Sam Popkin and Susan Shirk, Anne-Marie Slaughter and Andrew Moravcsik, Sherry Smith and Marcus Corley, Nina Ni and Sun Tze, Andy Switky, Shane Tedjarati, Joe Tymczyszyn, Michele Travierso, Ping Wang, Sean Wang, Louis Woo, Candice and Jarrett Wrisley, Jenny and Bill Wright, Kevin Wu, Michael Zakkour, and Dan Guttman and ZeeZee Zhong.

During a ten-week period early in 2010, I turned my part of the Atlantics Web site over to teams of guest bloggers while I was finishing a draft of this book. For their excellent work I am grateful to them all. For the record, the full list, including a number of people already mentioned, is: David Allen, Phil Baker, Mark Bernstein, Eric Bonabeau, Keith Blount, Don Brown, Liam Casey, Ella Chou, Parker Donham, Kate Dougherty, Xujun Eberlein, Lizzy Bennett Fallows, Deborah Fallows, Eamonn Fingleton, Julian Fisher, Julio Friedmann, Piero Garau, Brian Glucroft, Edward Goldstick, Sriram Gollapalli, Paola and Jorge Guajardo, Glenna Hall, Shelley Hayduk, Bruce Holmes, Jeremiah Jenne, Alan Klapmeier, Christina Larson, Damien Ma, Adam Minter, Grace Peng, Lucia Pierce, Guy Raz, Sam Roggeveen, David Ryan, Sanjay Saigal, Kate Sedgwick, Chuck Spinney, Andrew Sprung, John Tierney, Kentaro Toyama, Michele Travierso, and Lane Wallace.