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    China Airborne
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    China Airborne
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    China Airborne
    Ebook287 pages4 hours

    China Airborne

    By James Fallows

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    More than two-thirds of the new airports under construction today are being built in China. Chinese airlines expect to triple their fleet size over the next decade and will account for the fastest-growing market for Boeing and Airbus. But the Chinese are determined to be more than customers. In 2011, China announced its Twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. Its goal is to produce the Boeings and Airbuses of the future. Toward that end, it acquired two American companies: Cirrus Aviation, maker of the world’s most popular small propeller plane, and Teledyne Continental, which produces the engines for Cirrus and other small aircraft.
     
    In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of this project and explains why it is a crucial test case for China’s hopes for modernization and innovation in other industries. He makes clear how it stands to catalyze the nation’s hyper-growth and hyper- urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America’s transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century. Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi’an, home to more than 250,000 aerospace engineers and assembly workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China’s pursuit of aerospace supremacy. He concludes by examining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and the rest of the world—and the right ways to understand it.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRandom House Publishing Group
    Release dateMay 15, 2012
    ISBN9780307907400
    Unavailable
    China Airborne

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    Reviews for China Airborne

    4/5

    25 ratings3 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I'm not particularly interested in airplanes or air transportation, but this book is fascinating. Fallows uses all things airplane related - but especially the design and building of airplanes - as a window on China's economic development strategies and challenges. The book builds to the question, can China achieve mastery of technologically-advanced industries - not just production, but front-end innovation and design, and back end high-value branding - without significantly changing the culture of governance? That's an important question, and Fallows poses it with a lot more nuance than some other authors I've read. But in part because the answer won't really be known for quite a while, the final chapters of the book aren't nearly as interesting as Fallow's discussion of how China's economy has gotten where it is today. The book also takes thoughtful account of the relationship between China's industrialization and environmental devastation. Airplanes, as it turns out, are a particularly good hook for this discussion, because they are disproportionately large sources of greenhouse gasses, and because specific characteristics of Chinese air policy, including requiring planes to fly low and requiring them to fly boxy, inefficient routes, result in much larger emissions that China's fleet of airplanes really needs to emit.
    • 5/5
      In "China Airborne," Fallows skillfully uses the rise and uncertain future of the aviation industry in China as a parable for the development in China. An avid political-economic analyst and storyteller, Fallows' account is surprisingly easy to read, given the complexity of his argument that China is "contradictory" yet exciting.Fallows is a charismatic writer with a succinct style. As such, not only do we relive his six years of living in and learning about China, but he never tarries too long before leading us to the next part of his argument (and his next story). Highly recommended.
    • 4/5
      Short book about China’s possibly burgeoning aeronautic industry, and the challenges and opportunities it faces/offers. Fallows emphasizes that there’s a huge amount of divergence in conditions across China, but also that there’s a great sense of possibility for improvement—something that often seems lacking in the US, where we don’t expect our government to do much that’s big. Of course, there’s plenty of cronyism and dysfunction in China; much of China’s investment in aeronautics may end up wasted as it produces planes that are too heavy and fails to innovate at the design end. Or not: Fallows concludes that anyone who claims to know what’s really going to happen in China is deluded at best. It sounds wishy-washy, but I found it a useful portrait of a fast-churning environment in which giant successes and failures are possible—and likely to have world-wide effects.