circumstances.
“Early on, some Chinese people pulled me aside and said, ‘We’re not really sure this will ever work in China,’ ” Joe T said to me, ten years after he began the project. “They were worried about losing face, disrupting the culture of ‘human relationships.’ ” One of his crucial allies was a pilot named Rao Xiaowu, who had flown MD-11s for China Eastern Airlines and gone on to become a senior flight-standards official at the CAAC. (The MD-11 was an even larger version of the familiar DC-10, an airplane with one engine under each wing and a third in the vertical stabilizer, just above the tail.) Rao had experience overseas and understood how profoundly Chinese airlines had to change if they hoped to reach international standards. The second champion was another pilot, Yang Yuanyuan, 10 who had joined the PLA at age sixteen during the Cultural Revolution, graduated from flight school at age nineteen, and joinedChina Southern Airlines, for which he eventually became chief pilot. In the late 1990s, as the cooperative Chinese-U.S. safety efforts were beginning, Yang had gone to CAAC as head of flight standards.
“Yang and Rao made clear that they really did expect this to work,” Joe T said. “They went to meetings and told people at all the airlines, ‘We want you to pay attention, because we want a system that is run to international standards.’ They told their colleagues, ‘If we stick to regulation by “human relations,” we’re going to keep having dead people. It has to be run the international way.’ ” Yang had the authority at CAAC to place key allies in the airlines’ safety department, which he used. “The Chinese have a term, ‘air-drop soldier,’ for someone who is dropped in because of high-level connections but doesn’t know what to do,” Joe T said. “Yang did just the opposite, making sure he had the right people in these roles.”
Neither the Chinese nor the U.S. government had a big budget for the training efforts, so Boeing continued underwriting much of the cost. United Airlines helped as well. In Seattle, visiting teams of Chinese regulators and check pilots watched Boeing train pilots in its simulators. In a special demonstration at United’s simulator center in Denver, they watched a pilot mimic the mistakes and rash judgments of an incompetent airman—mainly to observe how the United check pilot handled the situation and corrected his errors.
“Those exchanges started in 1997, and they have never stopped,” Joe T told me in Beijing in 2011. It was the beginning of the underpublicized but thoroughgoing near-integration of the U.S. and Chinese aviation establishments in safety measures. In 1999, Yang Yuanyuan became vice minister of the CAAC. Three years later, he became minister, and thus the single most influential person in China’s aerospace establishment. Did theirefforts make any difference? Through the next decade, Chinese commercial aviation, while expanding faster than any other country’s, was statistically among the world’s very safest. And it prepared for the surprising next transition the government authorities had in mind.
4 * The Chinese Master Plan
How aerospace fits into the larger vision
When Deng Xiaoping met Jimmy Carter in 1979 to formalize the new era in U.S.-China relations, which in turn helped provide markets for the new enterprises that were possible under Deng’s reforms, the per capita annual income throughout China was about a thousand dollars. Over the next thirty years, that went up almost fivefold, a sustained increase unprecedented in world economic history. Most of what has made the country steadily richer through that period has arisen from the following sequence:
farm to factory to bulldozer
.
First came improvements in
agriculture
, through a shift from inefficient collective farms to smaller private plots, plus very heavy use of insecticide and fertilizer (with subsidized water as well). The subsidies
“Early on, some Chinese people pulled me aside and said, ‘We’re not really sure this will ever work in China,’ ” Joe T said to me, ten years after he began the project. “They were worried about losing face, disrupting the culture of ‘human relationships.’ ” One of his crucial allies was a pilot named Rao Xiaowu, who had flown MD-11s for China Eastern Airlines and gone on to become a senior flight-standards official at the CAAC. (The MD-11 was an even larger version of the familiar DC-10, an airplane with one engine under each wing and a third in the vertical stabilizer, just above the tail.) Rao had experience overseas and understood how profoundly Chinese airlines had to change if they hoped to reach international standards. The second champion was another pilot, Yang Yuanyuan, 10 who had joined the PLA at age sixteen during the Cultural Revolution, graduated from flight school at age nineteen, and joinedChina Southern Airlines, for which he eventually became chief pilot. In the late 1990s, as the cooperative Chinese-U.S. safety efforts were beginning, Yang had gone to CAAC as head of flight standards.
“Yang and Rao made clear that they really did expect this to work,” Joe T said. “They went to meetings and told people at all the airlines, ‘We want you to pay attention, because we want a system that is run to international standards.’ They told their colleagues, ‘If we stick to regulation by “human relations,” we’re going to keep having dead people. It has to be run the international way.’ ” Yang had the authority at CAAC to place key allies in the airlines’ safety department, which he used. “The Chinese have a term, ‘air-drop soldier,’ for someone who is dropped in because of high-level connections but doesn’t know what to do,” Joe T said. “Yang did just the opposite, making sure he had the right people in these roles.”
Neither the Chinese nor the U.S. government had a big budget for the training efforts, so Boeing continued underwriting much of the cost. United Airlines helped as well. In Seattle, visiting teams of Chinese regulators and check pilots watched Boeing train pilots in its simulators. In a special demonstration at United’s simulator center in Denver, they watched a pilot mimic the mistakes and rash judgments of an incompetent airman—mainly to observe how the United check pilot handled the situation and corrected his errors.
“Those exchanges started in 1997, and they have never stopped,” Joe T told me in Beijing in 2011. It was the beginning of the underpublicized but thoroughgoing near-integration of the U.S. and Chinese aviation establishments in safety measures. In 1999, Yang Yuanyuan became vice minister of the CAAC. Three years later, he became minister, and thus the single most influential person in China’s aerospace establishment. Did theirefforts make any difference? Through the next decade, Chinese commercial aviation, while expanding faster than any other country’s, was statistically among the world’s very safest. And it prepared for the surprising next transition the government authorities had in mind.
4 * The Chinese Master Plan
How aerospace fits into the larger vision
When Deng Xiaoping met Jimmy Carter in 1979 to formalize the new era in U.S.-China relations, which in turn helped provide markets for the new enterprises that were possible under Deng’s reforms, the per capita annual income throughout China was about a thousand dollars. Over the next thirty years, that went up almost fivefold, a sustained increase unprecedented in world economic history. Most of what has made the country steadily richer through that period has arisen from the following sequence:
farm to factory to bulldozer
.
First came improvements in
agriculture
, through a shift from inefficient collective farms to smaller private plots, plus very heavy use of insecticide and fertilizer (with subsidized water as well). The subsidies
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