China’s regulatory standards, as applied by the CAAC, conformed to the worldwide guidelines laid out by international agreements. The message came back from the U.S. government to China: Before any more airlines get routes to the United States, we’d like to know more about how Chinese regulators do their business.
The Chinese airlines were naturally flummoxed. Boeing, an American company, had sold them the planes in expectation that they would be used on flights to the United States. Why would the American government get in the way of this transaction? Was this some kind of double-cross? The Chinese government would not interfere with commerce in this way! China Southern had more planes on order from Boeing, but its officials were in no mood to receive—or pay for—those planes unless this mess with the regulators got straightened out.
Boeing was not the cause of the safety problems with Chinese airlines, but Boeing decided that resolving them was partly its responsibility. In collaboration with the FAA, it began preparing a series of seminars, tours, training sessions, and briefings toconnect Chinese regulators and inspectors with their counterparts in the United States. Boeing could not legally hire current FAA employees to come to China to provide safety briefings. But it could hire recent retirees—and it contracted with several of them to come to China to size up the situation and then brief and train CAAC officials in several major cities. Joe T—who knew the FAA, Boeing, and China—was involved in coordinating this project.
Because of careful warnings by Joe T and others, the U.S. training team was hyper-sensitive about two aspects of this training exercise for their Chinese colleagues. One was to present all their recommendations in terms of meeting
international
standards for air safety and airline procedures, rather than seeming to say, This is how we do it in the U.S. of A. Presenting the challenge this way made it far more palatable to the Chinese side. Learning to comply with international standards was one more sign of modernization in China; doing things the “American way” could seem like a sign of continued subservience. The examples were, of course, from American practices at the FAA or the operational details of Boeing and United Airlines, but the leitmotif was that Americans had learned how to make their practices meet international standards, and they could help the Chinese do the same thing.
The other sign of cultural sophistication by the U.S. team was its awareness of “Chinese characteristics.” Even as the Chinese government and business officials felt they were moving toward international practices, they highly valued the idea that they were doing so in a distinctively Chinese way. Deng Xiaoping’s famous description of the country’s post-1979 market system as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” set the pattern. The term illustrated not only the flexibility of names forthe fast-moving contradictions of modern China—a “socialist” system with room for Lamborghini dealerships and the world’s starkest extremes between rich and poor—but also the importance of “Chinese characteristics,” known as
Zhongguo tese
, or. Because of China’s scale, its unusual speed and pattern of development, its low labor costs and other unusual cultural or historic features, systems developed in Tokyo or Los Angeles usually need adjustment to work properly when they are applied in Tianjin or Shenzhen. Even when they don’t need any changes, leaders of Chinese organizations value the idea that systems have been changed to reflect Chinese characteristics. This is their version of what Americans have come to call “American exceptionalism.” In the case of the air-safety briefing teams, this meant, for instance, that FAA and Boeing officials would explain how they wrote safety manuals and regulatory codes, leaving it to the Chinese to apply those principles in their own
The Chinese airlines were naturally flummoxed. Boeing, an American company, had sold them the planes in expectation that they would be used on flights to the United States. Why would the American government get in the way of this transaction? Was this some kind of double-cross? The Chinese government would not interfere with commerce in this way! China Southern had more planes on order from Boeing, but its officials were in no mood to receive—or pay for—those planes unless this mess with the regulators got straightened out.
Boeing was not the cause of the safety problems with Chinese airlines, but Boeing decided that resolving them was partly its responsibility. In collaboration with the FAA, it began preparing a series of seminars, tours, training sessions, and briefings toconnect Chinese regulators and inspectors with their counterparts in the United States. Boeing could not legally hire current FAA employees to come to China to provide safety briefings. But it could hire recent retirees—and it contracted with several of them to come to China to size up the situation and then brief and train CAAC officials in several major cities. Joe T—who knew the FAA, Boeing, and China—was involved in coordinating this project.
Because of careful warnings by Joe T and others, the U.S. training team was hyper-sensitive about two aspects of this training exercise for their Chinese colleagues. One was to present all their recommendations in terms of meeting
international
standards for air safety and airline procedures, rather than seeming to say, This is how we do it in the U.S. of A. Presenting the challenge this way made it far more palatable to the Chinese side. Learning to comply with international standards was one more sign of modernization in China; doing things the “American way” could seem like a sign of continued subservience. The examples were, of course, from American practices at the FAA or the operational details of Boeing and United Airlines, but the leitmotif was that Americans had learned how to make their practices meet international standards, and they could help the Chinese do the same thing.
The other sign of cultural sophistication by the U.S. team was its awareness of “Chinese characteristics.” Even as the Chinese government and business officials felt they were moving toward international practices, they highly valued the idea that they were doing so in a distinctively Chinese way. Deng Xiaoping’s famous description of the country’s post-1979 market system as “socialism with Chinese characteristics” set the pattern. The term illustrated not only the flexibility of names forthe fast-moving contradictions of modern China—a “socialist” system with room for Lamborghini dealerships and the world’s starkest extremes between rich and poor—but also the importance of “Chinese characteristics,” known as
Zhongguo tese
, or. Because of China’s scale, its unusual speed and pattern of development, its low labor costs and other unusual cultural or historic features, systems developed in Tokyo or Los Angeles usually need adjustment to work properly when they are applied in Tianjin or Shenzhen. Even when they don’t need any changes, leaders of Chinese organizations value the idea that systems have been changed to reflect Chinese characteristics. This is their version of what Americans have come to call “American exceptionalism.” In the case of the air-safety briefing teams, this meant, for instance, that FAA and Boeing officials would explain how they wrote safety manuals and regulatory codes, leaving it to the Chinese to apply those principles in their own
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